Change As Stability
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve just begun re-reading Isabel Kliegman’s excellent Tarot and the Tree of Life and I’ve already encountered a meaty subject that is worth a brief essay. Although her focus is Kabbalistic, she uses the Waite-Smith Tarot (aka “RWS”) to illustrate the text, which unfortunately introduces some of the prosaic non sequiturs characteristic of Pamela Colman Smith’s limited esoteric vision. There is an opinion among tarot scholars that, like the sly allusion to Aleister Crowley’s “dashed-off” Thoth booklet, Smith was working “without help from parents” (specifically A.E. Waite) while designing most of the RWS Minor Arcana. Here I’m contrasting the RWS version of the 2 of Pentacles with the Thoth 2 of Disks.
One of Aleister Crowley’s more intriguing formulaic equations is “Change equals stability; stability equals change,” a concept he applied to his 2 of Disks card with its message of “self-sustaining rhythm” in the form of a lemniscate. He also mentioned elsewhere that “if we stop moving we will fall over,” offering a corollary to the wisdom of mechanical engineering which proposes that walking is basically a “controlled fall” in that, if we fail to put one foot ahead of the other as we lurch forward, we will surely stumble. I’ve always taken Crowley to mean that the stability inherent in his view of change is one of perpetual motion, in which a coordinated and directed momentum assures that a balanced state of dynamic equilibrium will prevail. It is not the fitful, stop-and-start activity typical of most unplanned course corrections but rather a purposefully guided event that knows its route and its destination. However, as with any physical activity that requires rapid, coordinated shifts in balance and direction (skiing, bicycle riding, etc.), until it can be done at speed, stability will suffer and forward progress will be wobbly.
I’ve also likened it to the regulated sweep of a metronome that deviates not in the slightest from its prescribed rate of speed. It is this uniformity of movement that implies an inherent stability in the midst of perpetual change, an attribute of any type of pendulum (although their counterpoised swing eventually succumbs to the drag of inertia). For this reason I’ve ascribed the qualities of the pendulum to all of the tarot Twos; their duality is not static but in constant transition between two poles, an initially energetic but entirely linear state from which no dramatic departure other than a gradual tapering-off is anticipated. This keeps things interesting until the “clock winds down” and the parties to the activity become bored with one another and leave. A pendulum at rest is not an expression of “Two-ness” since the opposite extremes do not interact and merely regard their counterpart from a distance. This state of passive contemplation presents a becalmed tableau that is the antithesis of “stability as change;” it may be harmoniously disposed toward its binary mandate but it is going nowhere with it.
Kliegman finds the essential nature of the unsettled 2 of Pentacles to be an “instability” that promotes fleeing the scene in search of a safe haven rather than productively working through it (alternatively, she suggests that the performer should drop one of the balls and concentrate on the other one). Unlike the taut lemniscate of the Thoth 2 of Disk, the one being poorly juggled in the 2 of Pentacles is (as Kliegman notes) loose and sloppy. In another essay I described the visual impression offered by this image as “queasy” in that the man desperately needs to find his “sea-legs;” his adjustments to the environment are compulsory rather than voluntary, and he is barely in control as he tries to keep his feet. There can be no stability when change is this haphazard and reactive, with the situation being pulled first in one direction, then in the other. Where Crowley’s “stable change” can be worked with as long as one accepts the fact that such change is a moving target that won’t sit still at our pleasure, Smith’s rather frazzled premise is impossible to approach with any degree of methodical purpose in mind. (I hesitate to call it the “Waite-Smith premise” since in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot Waite describes the man as “dancing,” and his interpretation focuses on “gaiety, recreation, news and messages in writing” while “agitation” is only a minor footnote that Smith seized upon as symbolic of the entire scenario). As always, the metaphysical shrewdness of Crowley and Harris trumps that of Waite and Smith at every turn.
Incidental Postscript: After nearly six years of almost daily blogging, yesterday I exceeded 1,700 primarily brief (three-or-four-paragraph) essays. I have every intention of continuing as long as I can avoid repeating myself any more than I already have. I hope you’ll keep visiting.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on April 24, 2023.
