Theme Thursday - Beginning

The Tarot Major Trumps cards can be seen as a depiction of the individual's journey through life. In this view, The Fool (number 0) is the traveller on the path, but the first step on that path - birth - is not the card numbered 1 (The Magician), but rather #21, The World. In the Tarot scheme of things, The World is where we start the journey, and we travel down the road toward the ultimate goal of the soul's development, #2 The High Priestess (in my own deck retitled Psyche) and #1 The Magician; these two cards represent the soul's mastery of both the spiritual and physical realms.

The card depicted at the top is my handmade deck's World card, designed some 20 years ago, and the card to the left is a computer graphic collage I put together 7 or 8 years ago when I got some ideas for a new deck done on the computer (still thinking about that one). Both incorporate strong birth symbolism, but I'm not departing from tradition very far in that idea. A look at The World card in both the Tarot of Marseilles deck (derived from early 15th or 16th Century woodcut designs) and the current standard Rider-Waite deck (designed by A.E. Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith and published by Rider Publishing in 1909) carry the same strong birth imagery.

I also added the Apollo 8 Earthrise shot to my symbolism because to me this emphasized even more the notion of beginnings and birth. For the first time in our history, humanity was able to view the Earth from an entirely new perspective; we had literally gotten outside ourselves and were able to see us from a distance. And what we learned was that as beautiful as our Earth was living in the midst of it, it was just as beautiful seen from a distance - a jewel suspended in the black of space.

In any event, The World card is all about beginnings, birth, and even rebirth (although that notion of rebirth is more rightly the territory of #13 Death - which in my deck is renamed Rebirth). It's about starting up, or getting things started. It's also about getting back to basics - the nature motif is also very strong in all versions of the card, and the female figure in the traditional decks has often been interpreted as Mother Nature. And that makes sense, too; we always start with what Mama Gaiea gave us, and we build on that. So I thought The World card would be an appropriate response to this week's "Beginning" theme.

The music I chose for this week started playing in my head as soon as I started working on this post; I was hearing John Lennon sing "(Just Like) Starting Over" the whole time I was searching for the right images and writing the text. And when I went into YouTube to find a video for the song, this charming (and bittersweet; pay attention to the ending) rendition was the first listing, and I just couldn't resist. Enjoy!

Photos & text © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger