Drawn May 6th 2023
Moon Full and in Scorpio ♏️ Entering Sagittarius ♐️ at 1:04pm PT:
I’ve got an uncontrollable urge.
The Ace of Wands is associated with Atziluth: the highest of the four worlds on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life:
Atziluth corresponds to fire. What is conveyed—in the esoteric sense— by this element? One very helpful definition I have seen comes from this explanatory video on the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP) from Los Angeles based energy worker and Yogi “Nish the Fish”. The video is worth watching in its entirety, but the discussion of the deeper esoteric meaning of the element fire starts at 6:33:
Transcribed roughly here:
“some people call it will, but I like [Lyam Christoper Thomas]’s word for it which is impulse … a kind of pre-verbal, pre-cognitive impulse to action… What Jung would called feeling, we might call impulse, instinct, will or urge.”
Out of these my favorite descriptors are urge and impulse. Understanding that the energy represented by fire is pre-verbal and pre-cognitive is essential, and while I do think fire represents will, our notion of this word will may be misleading as it is deeply tied in with our cognitive and verbal capabilities: what we think we want, or should want, etc. Especially in the realm of Aces, it is crucial that we understand this energy at its pure, root, form, which again, I will reiterate, is decidedly pre-verbal, and pre-cognitive in the case of the suite of wands.
In my musical aside later on in this post I will do a deeper dive on the story of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitarist John Frusciante. I will bring him up here just to reference part of the sprawling, five-part conversation he had on Rick Rubin’s podcast last year [53:40 in the linked video].
Rubin and Frusciante discuss Frusciante’s famed synesthesia, which in the prime of its force went beyond “seeing music” and into a realm of immediate visual/aural intuition about which note should come next in a composition.
In order to describe this difficult-to-describe sensation, Frusciante offers a very day-to-day thought experiment: :
You’re scanning your DVD collection looking for a movie to watch. All of a sudden you see the exact movie you want to watch and pull it off the shelf. What happens to you at this moment, in your body and mind?
For me it’s a lift in my body and perhaps a mental satisfaction, based solely on the visual queue of seeing the spine of the DVD. Pulling the movie off the shelf then occurs with a minimum of cognitive interference. For someone as artistically attuned as Frusciante, it perhaps goes even further into an immediate cognition of the feelings, colors, etc. associated with movie.
Frusciante compares this moment of intuition to the experience of making music in a flow state, and Rubin concurs, comparing it to the moment in the studio as a producer of hearing the exact right take.
This is the essence of the Ace of Wands. We see this impulsive energy in Crowley’s card as jagged lines of energy emanating from a flaming torch.
In line with this, and with the idea that the Ace of Wands represents something that is not quite codified as will, Crowley begins his description:
This card represents the essence of the element of Fire in its inception. It is a solar-phallic outburst of flame from which spring lightnings in every direction. These flames are Yods, arranged in the form of the Tree of Life. (For Yod, see Atu IX supra.) It is the primordial Energy of the Divine manifesting in Matter, at so early a stage that it is not yet definitely formulated as Will.
By Yod’s Crowely of course refers to the Hebrew letter:
This letter makes the sound of a “y” and means a hand and is attributed to the 9th Trump card: The Hermit. I will write about Yod and the Hermit in more depth later on, but for now one important detail—per Crowley— is that the Yod is the basic building block of all other Hebrew letters: analogous to the role of the Ace of Wands as the initiatory spark behind all human enterprise. It is also, of course, the first letter of the Tetragrammaton.
As we see in the above, the hand in the Rider Waite and Hermetic cards projects from nowhere as if mystically. Such is the nature of such root powers: they are parts of Kether just below Ein Sof: The Boundless Light.
In day-to-day terms: creative ideas come seemingly out of nowhere, from a mystical source. As mystical as this source might seem, we can train ourselves to tap into it through meditation and other forms of spiritual openness, as well as magic. (We can also attempt to take dangerous shortcuts through drug use, as John Frusciante did for many years.. more on this later).
From Wikipedia:
This first Sefirah represents the primal stirrings of intent in the Ein Soph (infinity), or the arousal of desire to come forth into the varied life of being.But in this sense, although it contains all the potential for content, it contains no content itself, and is therefore called 'Nothing', 'The Hidden Light', 'The air that cannot be grasped'.
In other words, although Kether, and the Ace cards attributed to it, represent the first Sefira, there is a sense that they, like ein sof, are a part of the hidden realm.
Crowley writes as much in the book of Thoth:
On the other hand, Spirit represents Kether. Perhaps it was never in the mind of the Exempt Adept or Adepts who invented the Tarot to go so far into this matter. The point to remember is that, both in their appearance and in their meaning, the Aces are not the elements themselves, but the seeds of those elements.
Elsewhere, he lends an important caveat on the nature of the aces and the “small cards” in general:
Important: although these "small cards" are sympathetic with their Sephirotic origin, they are not identical; nor are they Divine Persons [emphasis mine]. These (and the Court Cards also) are primarily sub-Elements, parts of the "Blind Forces" under the Demiourgos, Tetragrammaton. Their rulers are the Intelligences, in the Yetziratic world, who go to form the Schemhamphorasch. Nor is even this Name, "Lord of the Universe" though it be, truly Divine, as are the Lords of the Atu in the Element of Spirit. Each Atu possesses its own private, personal and particular Universe, with Demiourgos (and all the rest) complete, just as every man and every woman does.
For example II's or VI's Three of Disks might represent the establishment of such an oracle as that of Delphi, or Viii's might be the first formula of a Code such as Manu gave to Hindustan; V's, a cathedral, XVI's, a standing army; and so on. The great point is that all the Elemental Forces, however sublime, powerful, or intelligent, are Blind Forces and no more.
This is rather dense, but reminds us that unlike the Major Arcana, and fixed spiritual elements such as gods, angels, and the sefirah, the small cards—while representative of hidden and splendid forces that we can benefit from tapping into—are at core blind forces of nature. We must study and understand these forces, but we do not have a direct personal relationship with them. They are in our toolbox, just as they are in the toolbox of the angels and gods .
The Upshot:
The Ace of Wands, like all aces, is a card of new beginnings. In the suite of wands, this relates especially to creative projects, or other endeavors in as far as they have a creative dimension.
The “new beginnings” represented by Aces can as easily represent something totally novel as a fresh take on a pre-existing enterprise.
As a novelist, for example, this card might represent for me the arrival of a new idea for a novel. I might then develop it in my head or on paper for months. It might indicate the beginning of the actual writing of said novel, or it might indicate the position that I happen to currently be in with regard to a certain project: that of going back to make a second draft of it, after a several-months break:
The return to the THE BLACK ALBUM is what the Ace of Wands currently means to me (my editor is handed me the draft back today, 6/10).
I’m excited to get back into this, although it may come at the price of a short-term lessening of intensity on this Tarot project.
Let’s say chapter one of On Tarot is coming to an end. It began with THE SUN, the source of all things, and ends—perhaps ironically, or perhaps totally appropriately for depending on your vantage point— with ACE OF WANDS: the card of new creative ventures.
Since April 10th, I have gone through 20/78 cards in the Thoth deck ( 21/79 if you include the Unicursal Hexagram card). All in all: that is just a hair over 1/4th of the deck, at a rate of about one card per 3 days.
I had set out wanting to write about a card per day, but this proved impossible when factoring in the Major Arcana. This mirrors, perhaps, a miscalculation made by Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris themselves, who began work on the Thoth deck thinking it would take a few months, but instead found their work stretching to five years.
I still believe the small cards can be written about in such a speedy manner (that a complete analysis can be done in 1-2 days), but the purity of pulling a card out of the deck at random each day and then writing about it immediately was perhaps just not meant to be. Heck, this purity would have been fairly promptly disrupted by pulling repeats, which I have found happened more quickly and with more frequency than expected.
I will return to this project in line with the lesson of the Ace of Wands: when I get that urge.This could be as soon as tomorrow evening, or as long as a week or two from now. In any case: it will not be long.
Some things that the Ace of Wands teaches us definitively:
The urge is unexpected, often coming from nowhere.
The urge must be respected.
If you don’t find some way to follow it, it will have ill consequences for you, and quite likely it will find another host. Therefore Follow it when it rears its head.
This is the energy that will take you through any creative work. Even as you find it waning in this direction and then the other, as your work your way down the Tree of Life toward Malkuth. It will be there, reminding you of the journey you set out on, and why you did so in the first place, providing you a lift of energy when you need it (always unexpectedly, always right on time).
For Malkuth is always in Kether and Kether always in Malkuth.
The Video
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Music Chosen
Murders by John Frusciante
Today, for a change, the music chosen actually relates deeply to the card. Murders is an instrumental track from John Frusciante’s third solo work, To Record Only Water for Ten Days his first solo album recorded sober.
The title is a reference to the purgative process of getting off drugs: a process of the body recalibrating itself to survive on the bare stuff of subsistence and nourishment (water).
FRUSCIANTEMANIA
I’ve been on a big John Frusciante kick lately.
Actually, I’ve been on a full RHCP kick: the first of my life. But it’s first and foremost a John Frusciante kick, as Frusciante’s guitar-work is above and beyond the element of RHCP I find the most compelling (next to, I suppose, Rick Rubin’s producing).
Anthony Kiedis, Chad Smith, and especially Flea are all undoubtedly, very talented, but it is becoming interested in both Rubin and Frusciante that has made me—for the first time in my life these past few weeks— a real Red Hot Chili Peppers fan.
This after a lifetime of feeling decidedly neutral about the band.
RHCP has been ubiquitous on modern-rock radio for my entire life. I have vivid memories of hearing songs like “Scar Tissue” and “Under the Bridge” in the backseat of my parents mini-van driving around Syracuse, NY in the late 90’s.
Later on “By The Way” and “Dani California” were both huge hits, and “Dani California” even made it onto the first Rock Band video game. I thought these songs, and really all Red Hot Chili Peppers songs, were basically just OK: I liked them a bit but didn’t love them.
I checked the band’s 2006 album Stadium Arcadium out of the library in 2008, and remember becoming quickly uninterested. The things was a double-album, two disks long. The two biggest hits off the album, “Dani California” and “Snow (Hey Oh)” were tracks one and two respectively, and after that it was all unfamiliar territory. “Tell Me Baby” is track two off the second disk, and has undeniable pop appeal, but after that it’s another 12 more deep cuts.
I remember in 2008, at age 13, having a hard time imaging the person who’d be down listen to two hours worth of new Red Hot Chili Peppers songs.
This generally neutral-to-negative sentiment towards RHCP is apparently shared by many Zillenials, and these memes are still hilarious to me, despite my recent swearing of allegiance to the pro-RHCP camp:
I think the band is somewhat unfairly regarded by younger fans for a number of reasons, however. People are squeemish of white bands with a significant influence from black music, for one thing, and even though Nu Metal and rap-rock have had a come back over the past half-decade, the redemptive quality here seems to be a certain hyper-pop aesthetic, absent from the virtuosic and sincere funk punk of the Chili Peppers.
Out of those music fans who spare some kind words for RHCP, it tends to be for Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik as undeniable touchstones; there is a general sense that everything from One Hot Minute onward is mainstream and lame.
My take on Stadium Arcadium was some version of this, I suppose. But maybe the Red Hot Chili Peppers of 2000+ just weren’t a band for teenagers in the way they had been in the 90’s.
I returned to Stadium Arcadium this past week and very much found my way into it. Sure, it’s an alt-rock album you can imagine a suburban dad listening to while driving his kids to Soccer practice, but the legitimate artistic credentials are still there, hardly far beneath the surface.
The fusion of the artistic talent represented especially by Frusciante and Rubin into a radio-friendly package is kind of an aesthetic of it’s own. There’s a kind of beauty to the funneling of raw talent into a bigger project that does not always hit its mark, but that exudes every-man appeal.
Take the John Frusciante of the early 90’s with his drug habits and synesthesia, and understand it is the same Frusciante playing on Stadium Arcadium. I don’t hear a sellout: I hear someone who had contact with the muse in it’s most fiery and passionate manifestation— so much so that it almost killed him—but who survived the encounter in order to make music more tempered, more chill than his early work, but brilliant in its own way and more spiritually grounded.
Frusciante is an intriguingly androgyne addition to an overall macho band, and an intriguingly artistic addition to a mainstream band. There is a purity in this, In Frusciante’s humble ceding of an intense artistic talent into something sober and larger than himself.
E.g., one of those Stadium Arcadium deep cuts (probably my favorite):
Frusciante doesn’t seem to be a 12-step program guy for say, but obviously has an intense spirituality through music. What some recovering addicts find in the stability of faith and family, it would seem Frusciante has found in music: both his solo career and the Chili Pepper’s Californication+ output.
For those who do not know the addiction story in detail:
During the years Frusciante was not in the band, between Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Californication, he delved into his solitary artistic identity: using cocaine and heroin to the point of his teeth falling out, not leaving his house, painting, making sprawling, occasionally brilliant solo-recordings.
Frusciante couldn’t cope with the lifestyle of being such a popular band, or so the narrative goes. His sensibilities clashed with the phallic pure-id of Kiedies. Obviously there was more to it than this, and when recounting the period he mentions a bad acid trip to Rick Rubin, among other things (see the linked podcast below).
But undoubtedly leaving Red Hot Chili Peppers was an attempt to take ownership back over his own art. Perhaps in many ways it was even successful. The only trouble was it landed him broke and very nearly dead. When he hit rock bottom, Flea helped him get into rehab, and after slowly nursing himself back to health, Frusciante rejoined the Chili Peppers to write and record Californication: a great record in my estimation.
The fact that Frusciante rejoined the Chili Peppers rather than the 27 club is a hopeful and remarkable story. Proof that you can dance with dark forces but then alchemize them into light.
My whole reconsideration of the Red Hot Chili Peppers started as part of a broader reconsideration of the entire production discography of Rick Rubin. This after reading his book The Creative Act: a brilliant self-help book meets spiritual-guide accessible not just to musicians but creatives of all stripes.
I listened to RHCP’s classic work in a focused way I never had previously, and in many cases listened to albums in their entirety for the first time (this was the case for even such a classic work as Blood Sugar Sex Magik; previously I’d really only known the singles).
Simultaneous with this, I delved into John Frusciante’s solo work, most principally his chaotic debut album Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt.
On first listen to Niandra I could barely believe my ears: this was the dude from Red Hot Chili Peppers? The overall sound was what would later be described as Lo-Fi and become very hip within Indie-rock.
Appropriately enough given his androgyne appeal, the cover featured Frusciante in drag.
Generally this album received mixed to negative reviews, and admittedly it’s a bit of a mess— recorded, as it was, at the height of Frusciante’s addictions. Even the most negative reviews, however, highlight moments of brilliance. For me perhaps no other track encapsulates Frusciante’s aesthetic as a guitarist as Untitled #7 :
As with Marilyn Manson, Sufjan Stevens, and other musicians I’ve written about rapturously in the past, I may have to humbly ask for a rain check on writing the full treatise on what Frusciante represents to me as an artist.
Really I should bring this back around to the Ace of Wands and the creative process….
The Ace of Wand represents the all important initiatory urge towards creation.
In part of one of Frusciante’s recent conversation with Rick Rubin (starting around the 48 minute mark in the below), Frusciante speaks with Rubin on how it is he fell into the spiral with drugs:
The TLDR is that Frusciante felt his synesthesia—and creative drive more broadly—slipping away from him, and turned to drugs as a means of recapturing it. Even when his addiction was worsening, and moving in a deadly direction, Frusciante fully understood and accepted this. The only thing that mattered to him was keeping the creative spark alive.
Though I don’t use drugs myself, I found myself surprisingly sympathetic to this path. When you choose the vocation of artist, following the muse does indeed seem to be the only thing that matters, consequences be damned.
Drugs are a tried and true method of taking a dangerous (often deadly) shortcut toward inspiration. Particular once addiction takes over, however, this is a dangerous and spiraling state.
The Ace of Wands represents the initial spark of creativity, and the ace of wands gets significantly tripped up by addiction.
Especially in the realm of art, I have found the Ace of Wands is a totally necessary moment: you can’t force any work that doesn’t start with such an initiatory moment. Sure, art isn’t just about inspiration but also about hard work, but this hard work should be in the support of an existing flame. If you don’t have a spark at the beginning, you have nothing.
We can’t just follow every urge though. We must discern, and discernment can be very tricky: which urges to follow, which not to follow, etc. In a harmonious flow state urges can be followed unassuaged by critical thinking. This is the happy place for the artist; it’s what Frusciante had in spades at the height of his synysthesia, and what he went chasing after—even unto death— when he felt it leaving him.
Often we get trapped in bad urge cycles as in the case of addiction or other anxious thought patterns. Only we can discern for ourselves when to lean into the flow and when we need to lean out. This is why it’s often best as a creative person to eschew drugs entirely.
Shortly before Frusciante checked into rehab, he was discovered by his friend Angelo Moore of the band Fishbone, covered from head to toe in paint and speaking incoherently.
Symbolically perhaps we might say he was trying to turn himself into art: to become totally subsumed by it.
But there is a better path.
We need not fully eschew control in this way. Rather there are tools we can use to harness the muse and harness creative power to our own ends without being destroyed by them.
Meditation is one critical tool to tap into creative source energy, and the post-drugs Frusciante evidently practices it.
It is well established that John Frusciante has also long been interested in Aleister Crowley and the occult.
I am not sure to what extent other members of the Chili Peppers share this interest, but it is no small thing that they spelled “magik” in Blood Sugar Sex Magik with a ‘k’.
Regardless of if it is Frusciante’s exclusive purview within the band, it is undoubtable that he is the most mystical Chili Pepper.
He even recently cited the occult as a reason he left the Red Hot Chili Peppers for a second time in 2009, at the end of the Stadium Arcadium tour:
"I became quite off-balance mentally those last couple of years we toured….As the tour went on, I got deep into the occult, which became a way of escaping the mindset of tour life….The occult tends to magnify whatever you are, and I was an imbalanced mess."
In the above, it would seem that Frusciante’s relationship with the occult has been at times—like his relationship with drugs—a negative thing.
Nevertheless: I think Frusciante’s interest in the occult makes sense, and I would counter that when approached properly, the occult can be something much lighter than drug-use that potentially scratches the same itch.
Consider that the motivation behind Frusciante’s intense relationship with drugs was a desire to keep alive the spark of his creativity and to keep the flow state going.
The occult can give us tools to pursue the same thing sober.
We can understand the occult, in a demystified sense, as energy work, and in the case of the arts this energy work is particularly committed to the flow and manifestation of creative energy. By studying something like tarot, I’d like to think we can understand the behavior of creative energy in way that we can tap into without making ourselves a full bodily sacrifice to it (as in the case of drug addiction).
So long and thanks for all the fish? Definitely enjoyed your insightful posts to date. Curious about your next book/written work too. I’ll be around for the long haul 🫡