Contemplative Inquiry

I use the word ‘myth’ in a positive sense. Myth is a gift of imagination. It is a way of seeing beyond the limiting horizons of everyday life and culture. We can intuit a fuller, more spacious and generous reality, a reality with multiple dimensions. The specific myth of the journey, or quest, has had a powerful role in human history at both the personal and collective levels.

The picture above is the Fool, or innocent, as depicted the The Druidcraft Tarot (1). Trusting their inner knowing, the Fool steps over a cliff. It is a spring dawn, and a new beginning. The major Arcana are a map of the journey, which in essence, here, is seen as a refinement of the soul to the point where union with the divine is a lived experience. This experience is available here, in the world, and so the card indicating the completion of the journey (see picture below) is here called The World.

The mythology of the deck draws on the Welsh Celtic story of Taliesin and Ceridwen as well as the pan-European Arthurian grail quest, and broader Western Mysteries understandings derived from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But any individual journey is its own new beginning and its fruits depend of making the journey in real time, and not clinging too tightly to traditional understandings.

In my own spiritual life, I have drawn both on the myth of the journey and another, apparently contradictory myth – that of the eternal moment, the transfigured here-and-now. Again, I find no disparagement in the word myth. This says that non-separation from the divine is a given. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do. Ultimately, there is no ontological difference in being awake to this reality than in being asleep to it. Yet lived experience is transformed by being awake to this reality and living from the awareness.

From a human perspective, coming to this awareness and then living it are, experientially, a journey in themselves. Another way of looking at it would be to say that I am the Fool and the Universe (my preferred term for the final card) at the same time, every day. In this way, I reconcile the myth of the journey with the myth of the now, and draw strength from both.

(1) Philip & Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druidcraft Tarot: Using the Magic and Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London, UK: Connections, 2004 (Illustrations by Will Worthington)