When my hands stopped fluttering and my heart calmed down, I cut the deck and looked at the two cards. The Fool and the Magician. "You're funny, Old Man," I muttered, and the Chorus slithered through my brain like oil across water. I put these two on the table, face up, and then buried them beneath the rest of the deck, like a layer of fall leaves covering the seeds planted for spring.
I took a sip from my cup, and glanced at the traffic and people walking along the sidewalk. All so normal. All so mundane. A normal day, late in the season; life moving toward spring again, getting ready to bud and grow another year.
When I dug up the Fool and the Magician, they had changed into the Ten of Pentacles and Ace of Cups.
The Marseille Ten only shows the coins, and there is no background on it like the gate and magician that crops up in the Rider-Waite deck. Nor is there the re-arrangement of the coins into the positions of the Tree of the Sephiroth. The Marseille Ten is just a field of coins, but the meaning is the same. This is the realization of spiritual wealth in the death of the gross body. This is the breath of resurrection that is the reward for those who have prepared themselves for the next realm, the world of light and wind that lies just beyond the arch (or, in the case of the Marseille deck, that lies beyond this field of coins, round-headed disks covered with ornamentation so that they almost seem like flowers).
The Ace of Cups is the Grail, of course, but in the Marseille deck, it is a miniature castle resting on top of a golden base. A chapel perilously perched above the firmament.
When I touched both cards, they merged into a single image: a chapel with stained-glass windows. Not far, a voice in the Chorus whispered. Close enough to touch.
The image vanished when I took my hands off the cards, and they stayed quiescent as I re-assembled the deck and put it away. I sat in the sun, drinking my coffee, until the cup was empty and my bones were warm.
Close enough to touch. The same thing the Chorus had told me over and over again when I had gotten close to Kat in Seattle last fall.
Very funny indeed, Old Man.
He had been pushing me for a long time. How much longer was I going to let him manipulate me?
We all pass through Yesod, he had said. The Ninth Sephirotic globe, one step up from the fleshy death of Malkuth. Knowledge realized. Wisdom gained. One step closer to God.
Maybe I was asking the wrong question. How much longer was I going to let anyone manipulate me?
VI
From the outside, the building was a nondescript rectangle, but inside, the walls came in, forming a shallow transept. The nave was obviously more narrow than the width of the building proper, an architectural illusion so as to provide a sense of depth to the shallow indentations of the transept. Tiny niches along the outer edges formed a blister of bubbles, filled with stained glass. As the church was sequestered between other buildings on the street, the stained glass wasn't windows, but panels that were lit from behind.
The church was a small chapel, tucked down an alley about a mile from the cemetery. A sort of locals-only church that wasn't on any of the tourist maps, nor were there any indications on the street that a place of worship existed down in the alley. I found it because the leys converged on it, currents arcing off the main flow into this nondescript alley.
The place was lit by soft lights, recessed in the floor behind the row of column arches set off a few feet from the walls. Mounted to the western wall was a massive cross of wood, and hanging peacefully, as if asleep, was an equally enormous Christ figure. Tall candelabras stood in attendance on either side of his nailed feet, and light from the candle flames danced on his skin.
He was made from glass.
I knelt on a prie-dieu in the front, resting my forearms on the padding rail, so as to get a better look at him. The work was clever in that the scrap of cloth covering his waist was real as was the crown of thorns on his head, and his features and hair were a mix of paint and colored glass. Unless you had some experience with the luminous qualities of glass, you wouldn't realize what the material was. It would be easy to leap to the conclusion that the way the light reflected off his skin was from a divine influence, that God Himself blessed this church and this idol of His son.
I hadn't been in a church in several years, as I typically didn't have much reason to traffic in their sort of communal psychosis. Like all modern religious spaces, they are a confusion of profane noise and sacred reverberations. It is difficult to find a space that is pure in its harmonic resonance with the energy flow, as most secular-based religions have spent centuries codifying their blindness. Occasionally, you could still find a place that wasn't completely moribund-the Grotto, outside of downtown Portland, for example-but most of the nexus points are no longer located beneath the old holy stomping grounds.
Our temperament shifts, over generations, and while we never lose our fear of the unknown, we hide from it in different temples now.
At least, that had been my experience with churches in the United States. Some of the older places, ones that had history going back a hundred years or more, still had the magick in their bones. Too many years of regular service, too many penitents praying for guidance, too many dreamers asking for some sign of the Divine. These sorts of echoes permeate stone after a while, and the stone never quite lets go.
This church had some history in its bones. The building was clearly the oldest structure in the alley, and while the inside looked like it had been made over in the last hundred years, the leys still converged on it as if they had been redirected by several generations of foot traffic. Or maybe it was something else.
What do you want me to See, Old Man? There was no answer from the Chorus. I was going to have to figure this out myself. Even in death, he was still teaching.
Like all new students, I had struggled with the semantic distinctions the Watchers placed on certain words: seeing and Seeing; knowing and Knowing; Witnessing. This uppercase emphasis like we were reenacting one of Byron's Romantic epics. But, gradually, like all initiates, I came to understand the subtleties of our discourse. Language is an imperfect system, more so when you start working in several tongues at once (cultural mores start to become an issue; more than once I felt like I needed advanced degrees in history and cultural anthropology to understand the lessons given to us). Almost like Platonic Ideals, some words were echoes of older, more enlightened, concepts. An extra stress on the initial syllable (a capitalization, if you will) implied the higher meaning of the word.
The distinction between seeing and Seeing, for example. I could describe the physical attributes and placement of all the objects in this church, but such a passive description failed to explain why they had been placed the way they had. Such mundane objectivity couldn't encompass the movement of energy and Will required to make this scene the way it was. Who made the Christ? Why had they chosen glass as their medium? What effect did that have on the congregation? Or on the energy patterns?
Glass could distort or mirror, affording the viewer either a filtered view of reality or a reflection. It didn't have any identity of its own, forever slippery to the viewer. A perfect vehicle for inspiring meditation and personal reflection. Look upon my face, my children, look up and tell me what you see? asked the face of the glass Christ. What pains you?