God of Tarot (21 page)

Horses? No, these were four incredible monsters in harness! One had the head of a bull, another that of an eagle, a third that of a man, and the fourth that of a lion. The four symbols of the elements! Yet the bodies did not match. The man-head had eagle’s talons; the lion-head had eagle’s wings, woman’s breasts, and bull’s feet. All the components of the sphinx, yet none of these
was
the sphinx.

“What am I doing here?” Brother Paul cried out in confusion.

The man-head turned to him, and framed by its Egyptian headdress was the face of Therion. “You are the Charioteer!” the monster cried. “I am guiding you through the Tarot, as you requested.”

“But I didn’t mean—” Brother Paul broke off. What
had
he meant? He had asked for guidance, and the Chariot was the next card, Key Seven. The symbol of victory, or of the Wheels of Ezekiel, drawn by two sphinxes representing the senses: part lion, part woman. The occult forces that had to be controlled so that they would power man’s chariot. Without such control, he could not find his way out of the morass these Animations had led him into, let alone separate God from chaos.

So why were there four steeds instead of two? Because this was not the card Brother Paul knew, but the one Therion knew. No wonder this was hard to manage! “Give me the other variant!” Brother Paul cried.

The composite creatures shifted and merged into two white horses. The chariot became medieval. “No, not that one!” More shifting, and two sphinxes appeared, one black, one white. “Yes,
that
one!” he cried, and the variant became fixed.

The white sphinx turned its head to face him. “How nice to see you again,” she said.

“Light!” Brother Paul cried in recognition. “I mean, the apologist for the Tarot of the Brotherhood of Light! I thought this was the Waite deck.”

She wrinkled her pert nose. “I hoped you had given up on that discredited innovation.”

“Now you sound like Therion.”

She snorted delicately. “Why choose between evils, when truth is available? Be yourself, the Conqueror; use the Sword of Zain to break through all obstacles, crush your enemies, and achieve sovereignty of spirit.”

Brother Paul caught on. “You call Key Seven ‘The Conqueror’!”

“Arcanum Seven, yes. This is historically justified in the Bible.”

Oh-oh. Brother Paul did not want to get involved in another technical discussion, but his curiosity had been piqued. “The Bible?”

“Joseph, sold into Egypt, overcame all obstacles and rose to great power, as indicated by the sword.” Brother Paul discovered that he was holding a curved blade in his right hand, not a cup. He set the sword down, afraid he would inadvertently cut the starry canopy. He remembered that the Hebrew alphabet for the Light Tarot differed from what he was used to. In that deck, Key Seven was Zain, the Sword. So the lady was correct, by her definitions. “He was tempted by Potiphar’s wife, in Arcanum Six, but he triumphed over the temptation. He interpreted the dream of Pharaoh about the seven fat kine and the seven lean kine, and the seven good ears and the seven bad ears. And Pharaoh told him: ‘See I have set thee over all the land of Egypt,’ and made him to ride in a chariot, and made him ruler over—”

“Bullshit!” the black sphinx cried.

The white sphinx froze, shocked.

“Oh, Therion,” Brother Paul said, trying to sound reasonable, although he too was upset by the interjection. “Now look, she didn’t interfere in
your
presentation.”

“I never uttered such nonsense! Women are such brainless things; if they didn’t have wombs they’d be entirely useless.”

The man was certainly contemptuous of the fair sex! What was the matter with him? In other respects he seemed to be quite intelligent and open-minded. “Still,” Brother Paul admonished him, “you should not interrupt.”

The lady sphinx turned her head toward the black sphinx, and then her body. The chariot veered, for they were both still galloping forward at a dismaying velocity. “No, I want to hear his objections. Does he challenge the validity of the Bible?”

“The Bible is hardly an objective account, and what there is is both incomplete and expurgated. Naturally the Hebrews and their intolerant, jealous God colored the record to suit themselves. How do you think the poor, civilized Egyptians felt about this barbaric conqueror?”

“They
welcomed
the Hebrews! Pharaoh raised up Joseph, put his own ring on Joseph’s hand, arrayed him in fine linen, put a gold chain about his neck—”

“Bullshit!” Therion repeated. He seemed to enjoy uttering the scatological term in the presence of the lady. “Pharaoh gave away nothing! The Hebrew tribesmen and their cohorts came in, a ravening horde from the desert, overrunning the civilized cities, burning houses, pillaging temples and destroying monuments. They were the nefarious Hyksos, the so-called ‘shepherd kings,’ who ravaged cultured Egypt like pigs in a pastry shop for two hundred years before their own barbaric mismanagement and debauchery weakened them to the point where the Egyptians could reorganize and drive them out.
That
is why you call this
Atu
‘The Conqueror.’ Joseph was a rabble-spawned tyrant, thief, and murderer. What little civilization rubbed off on his ilk was Egyptian, such as the Qabalah—”

“Kabala?” Light inquired.

“Qabalah. This was stolen from Egyptian lore, just as the golden ornaments were stolen from Egyptian households. The ones these thieves melted down to form the Golden Calf, a better deity than they deserved, before they settled, by the fiat of Moses, on a bloodthirsty, competitive, nouveau-riche God whose name they were ashamed to utter.”

“I don’t have to listen to this!” Light exclaimed. The scene began to change.

“Wait!” Brother Paul cried, suffering a separate revelation. This unrelenting attack on the roots of the Judeo-Christian religion—he recognized the theme, from somewhere.

“Waite? That does it!” the white sphinx snapped. She veered away, making the chariot tilt alarmingly.

Why had he chosen Therion as a guide, instead of Light? How much better he empathized with her! Now, when he had almost gotten her back into the scene, she was going again. The chariot was rocking perilously, about to overturn, a victim of this religious debate. The sphinxes phased into two great horses again, white and black, then these animals fragmented into the composite monsters of Therion’s Thoth
Atu
. Again Brother Paul found himself clutching the huge cup, which somehow he knew he dare not drop.

“Seven!” he cried. “I deal the Seven of Cups!”

The cup he was holding, which had given him this emergency inspiration, expanded. It was made of pure amethyst, its center a radiant, blood red. It was the Holy Grail.

The Cup expanded to encompass him, its radiance spreading out like the sunrise. Brother Paul felt himself falling into it…

And he was splashing, swimming in a sea of blood. Thick, gooey, greenish ichor—the blood of some alien creature, perhaps from Sphere Antares, rather than of man. Great, cloying drops of it pelted down, forming slowly expanding ripples in the ocean. The drops fell from other cups: ornate blue vessels, six of them, set about a metallic support that rose from a larger cup resting on the surface of this awful sea. The green goo overflowed from each cup, and especially from the large one. Flowers lay inverted atop each cup, tiger lilies or lotuses; it was from them that the slime seemed to issue. The smell of corruption was awful.

“Thus the Holy Grail is profaned by debauchery,” the voice of Therion said. It seemed to come from the largest cup, the seventh one, as though the man himself were immersed in its septic fluid.

“I have no interest in debauchery,” Brother Paul protested, gasping. He was weighed down by his armor, trying to tread water, and the stench hardly helped his breathing. “I dealt the Seven of Cups.”

“Indeed you did! Note how the holiest mysteries of nature become the obscene and shameful secrets of a guilty conscience.”

Brother Paul opened his mouth to protest again, then abruptly realized the significance of the framework holding the cups. It was a convoluted, overlapping double triangle, shaped into the stylized outline of the female generative organs. Womb projecting into vagina, the largest cup being the vulva, overflowing with greenish lubrication from the sex organs of the plant Flowers were of course copulatory organs, made attractive so that other species, such as bees, would willingly aid the plants to reproduce. How many prudish women realized the full significance of what they were doing when they poked their noses into bright flowers to sniff the intoxicating perfume? Nature laughs at the pretensions of human foibles.

Still, enough was enough. Brother Paul did not care to remain bathed in these thick juices. “The
Waite
Seven of Cups!” he cried.

“Oh, very well,” Therion said grouchily. “It
is
one of Arthwaite’s better efforts, for all that he misses the proper meaning entirely.”

The sea boiled, releasing great clouds of steam. From a distance came Therion’s voice: “You’ll be sorry!” And it echoed, “Sor-ry! Sorr-rry!”

The sea evaporated into clouds of greenish vapor, leaving Brother Paul standing on a gummy film of green that became a lawn. The cups retained their positions, however, turning golden yellow. The flowers above them dropped inside, mutating into assorted other objects that showed over the rims. At last he stood before this display of seven cups supported by a gray cloud bank.

“There it is,” Therion said, now standing beside him. “Confusing welter of images, isn’t it?”

“Are you still here? I thought Waite would—

“You chose
me
as your guide, remember? Way back in Key Sex. I mean Six. You may view any cards you wish, but
I
shall do the interpretations.”

So that choice had been permanent, at least for the duration of this vision. Brother Paul feared he had chosen carelessly. Well, he would carry through, and be better prepared next time.
This
time, confronted with the choice between Virtue and Vice, it seemed he had chosen Vice. At least he had some familiarity with this particular image, although the Holy Order of Vision did not put much stress on the Minor Arcana.

First, he had to orient himself. Why, exactly, was he here? He had wanted to get out of the careening chariot, of course, and out of the slime-soup of Therion’s Seven of Cups, but what was his
positive
reason?

Answer: he was here to discover the ultimate ramifications of these Animations. His short-range objective of getting out of this particular sequence was passé; no matter how he struggled, he only seemed to be getting in deeper, as a man mired in quicksand only worsens his situation by thrashing about. (Though he had always understood that, since sand was denser than water, a man should readily float in quicksand, and so was in no danger if he merely relaxed. Could he float, here in Animation, if he just went along with it?) So he might as well follow through now, on the theory that it was as easy to move forward as backward.

When God manifested for him, as He had for others, whose God was it? Questioning the Hierophant had not helped; Brother Paul had first to comprehend the specific nature of the manifestations. Once again he reviewed it, hoping for some key insight. Were the visions purely products of his own mind, or was there some objective reality behind them? This remained a very difficult question to resolve, for how could he judge the validity of material drawn from his own experience? It was like trying to find a test for whether a person was awake or dreaming; he could pinch himself—and dream he was being pinched. If he knew what any given detail of an Animation was, that detail would be authentic; if he suffered from misinformation, how could he correct the image? Yet now it certainly seemed as though there were input from other minds, for Brother Paul had not before known all the details of the Tarot variants he had perceived in this Animation. Some of the concepts this Therion character had put forward were entirely foreign to Brother Paul’s belief, yet again, these might be his own suppressed notions coming out, all the more shocking because he had always before denied their existence. The hardest thing for a man to do was to face the ugly aspects of himself.

So maybe he should face those aspects. Maybe the thing to do was to plunge all the way into this vision and grasp his answer before it faded. Surely it was in one of these displayed cups. At any rate, he owed it to himself and to his mission to look.

He inspected the cups more closely. One contained a tall miniature castle, another was overflowing with jewels, and others had a wreath, a dragon, a woman’s head, a snake, and a veiled figure. All were symbols whose significance he had reviewed in the course of his studies at the Holy Order of Vision. But never before had they been presented as tangibly as this, and he knew now that these Animated symbols would not submit passively to conventional analysis.

The castle was similar to the one he had seen on prior cards, probably the same edifice. Symbolism in the Tarot tended to be consistent; a river was always the stream of the unconscious, originating in the trailing, flowing gown of the High Priestess, and the cup was always a vessel of emotion or religion. The castle represented for him a rallying point, an initial answer. Suppose he entered it now?

Well, why not
try
! He tended to spend too much time pondering instead of acting.

And the castle expanded, bursting out of its cup, becoming a magnificent edifice with banners flying from its lofty turrets, situated atop a precipitous mountain. Beautiful.

Brother Paul set out for it. Therion accompanied him, humming a tune as though indifferent to the proceedings.

“I’ve heard that song,” Brother Paul said, determined not to let the man escape involvement so easily. “Can’t quite place it, though.”

“The ‘Riddle Song,’” Therion answered promptly. “One of the truly fine, subtly sexual folk expressions.”

“Yes, that’s it. ‘I gave my love a cherry’—but how is that sexual? It’s a straightforward love song.”