The Secret Language of Tarot ( Ruth Ann and Wald Amberstone)

MOUNTAINS

Welcome to our class on the image of the mountain in tarot. Mountains appear in at least twenty-five cards, of which we will discuss seven in class-the io of Swords, Judgement, The Moon, The Tower, Temperance, The Hermit, and The Lovers.

We're going to give you the end of the class first, like dessert before the vegetables, because we want this impression to be the first and most lasting.

The single most important thing to know about mountains is that they reach beyond the ordinary, and their presence lifts our consciousness above the ordinary even when they are far away. Up close, they don't just reach beyond the ordinary, they annihilate it, and they annihilate the ordinary in us as well.

But smallness is not just vaporized. It's replaced. At the top of a high mountain, a human being is released into the perspective of the roof of the world. The mountain's height becomes the person's height. All of the mountain's immensity enters the senses and transforms the consciousness of the beholder.

Beauty, strangeness, barrenness, utter extremes, and a spontaneous sense of the sacred; wind, ice, rock; cold and thinness and clarity of air; immense distances, spectacular colors, sudden engulfing storms; utter disinterest in the needs, or even in the existence, of life-all these are the hallmarks of a mountain peak's impact on human awareness.

In an environment as extreme, as magnificent, as deadly as this, a human being can survive for only a short while and even then only with the help of extraordinary skills, endurance, and strength. Simply to reach such an environment can be the ultimate test of personal strengths and weaknesses. Just to draw its experience into lungs, eyes, and heart is enough of a reason to undergo the effort and to take the risk to achieve it.

This is the essence of the mountain's meaning in tarot, although there are other less important issues connected with mountains in general and tarot mountains in particular. We need to know and understand these too, if we are to make the best intuitive use of mountains as a symbol.

In tarot, as in the world, mountains come singly, in pairs, and in ranges. But however they appear, if they're in your neighborhood, you have to deal with them. The most obvious characteristic of mountains is that, more than anything else, they totally dominate your vision. You can't miss them.

Mountains serve seven main functions for human beings. They are:

i. landmarks

2. boundaries

3. barriers

4. challenges

5. fortresses

6. retreats

7. habitable landscapes

Mountains may be observed, approached, climbed, passed over or through, dwelt on or dwelt within.