9.21.23
Moon: Waxing Crescent in Sagittarius.
Mercury Retrograde: post shadow until the 30th.
Next Full Moon: One day earlier, September 29th. Harvest Moon in Aries.
A time of building.
On The Card:
I once pulled The Star at one of those crucial junctures in the life of a tarot student where I felt like I absolutely needed its auspices.
Trying to manifest a specific outcome from a deck is not necessarily something I recommend. I have only very rarely done it, and this particular instance was the only time I’ve ever done it with high a level of intention and focus: really needing the result, really visualizing it. I think I even said something to myself like “if this isn’t the star, I’m done with Tarot”.
But it worked.
The chances were 1/80 with my edition of the Thoth deck. Such results would turn $100 into $8,000 in Vegas. I am not sure if they exactly prove that magic is real, but they were certainly uncanny.
The Star is the kind of card that lends itself to this kind of desperate desire and glorious satisfaction. A symbol of dark times coming to an end or a karmic debt about to (finally) be paid. It encapsulates desire for recognition: narcissism, but not necessarily in a bad or unhealthy sense.
In Crowley’s card, the foregrounded Goddess (Nuit) holds two cups: showering herself with the one while pouring out the other. The symbol is that of total emotional self-reliance: a state which may include, but is not limited to, internal access to the divine femme. A call to be your own nurturing and supportive mother. That incel/twink jouissance thing that is hard to define but that you know when you see: the man without women who seems to have internalized something of the feminine, and sublimated it into an outward facing aesthetic pursuit. As an artist the card may be a reminder to stop seeking the muse externally but to find it within yourself.
In line with this idea of grounded, emotional fulfillment, Crowley compares the cups held by the figure in the card to breasts and the fluid coming from them to milk:
“…she is represented as bearing two cups, one golden, held high above her head, from which she pours water upon it. (These cups resemble breasts, as it is written: ‘the milk of the stars from her paps; yea, the milk of the stars from her paps’. "
But Crowley extrapolates the symbolism of these fluids much more broadly.
The golden cup, which she pours on her own head with her right hand, he writes is “ethereal water, which is also milk and oil and blood.” Indicating: “the eternal renewal of the categories, the inexhaustible possibilities of existence”.
Elsewhere in the book of Thoth, Crowley describes this process thus:
This is a glyph of the Economy of the Universe. It continually pours forth energy and continually reabsorbs it. It is the realisation of Perpetual Motion, which is never true of any part) but necessarily true of the whole.”
The silver cup in her left hand “pours the immortal liquor of her life….[t]his liquor is the Amrita of the Indian philosophers, the Nepenthe and Ambrosia of the Greeks, the Alkahest and Universal Medicine of the Alchemists, the Blood of the Grail; or, rather, the nectar which is the mother of that blood. She pours it upon the junction of land and water.”
In as far as these images have Kabbalistic significance, Crowley explains:
This water is the water of the great Sea of Binah; in the manifestation of Nuith on a lower plane, she is the Great Mother. For the Great Sea is upon the shore of the fertile earth, as represented by the roses in the right hand corner of the picture. But between sea and land is the "Abyss", and this is hidden by the clouds, which whirl as a development of her hair: ‘my hair the trees of Eternity’”. (AL. 1, 59).
The image of the Mother of Goddess as a bringer of things into manifestation is here important, and the roses represent such physical fruition.
That the Goddess Nuith is here embodied as a manifested, singular woman is evidently important to Crowley, who contrasts this representation with her more expansive representation in e.g. the back panel of ATU XX “The aeon”:
Crowley writes that in The Aeon she is "the pure philosophical idea continuous and omniform”, whereas in The Star “she is definitely personified as a human-seeming figure”.
Crowley also draws a connection between The Star and ATU XI, Lust, noting the placement of the Star of Babalon in the upper left corner of the The Star. This is the “ Sigil of the Brotherhood of the A.'. A.'. For Babalon is yet a further materialization of the original idea of Nuith; she is the Scarlet Woman, the sacred Harlot…”
Crowley refers to the seven-sided star of Venus within the orb as a symbol of the “principal characteristic of her nature to be Love”. This seven sided star is much more prominent in the Rider Waite version of the card:
Which features also a woman holding a jug in each hand, feeding water back into a water with one hand (in a symbol of eternal renewal), and fertilizing earth with the other.
The Hermetic card is also similar in its basic imagery, and inclusion of the seven sided star. The sevenfold nature of the star is also used— in the case of the Hermetic card— to invoke the seven classical planets. Lower on the card: The Tree of life and the 12 signs of the Zodiac are also invoked as charters of manifestation and the mystical relationship between the spiritual and the material.
The midway point between these two realms is often understood as the tangible sky or firmament, and thus the lady of the Hermetic card is dubbed “daughter of the firmament”. The sky and visible heaven appear to us as a physical phenomenon but also open up the much more expansive, invisible idea of the beyond. In this way they are both a high-up level of the physical realm, but also a metaphysical symbol of the invisible realm.
Thus it is no surprise that on the Tree of Life The Star represents the path from Chochma to Tiferet: bridging Atziluth (the world of emanation above the abyss) and Briyah (the world of creation below the abyss).
Thus The Star has both a physical and metaphysical character.
This is actually a change made by Crowley from an older map of the tarot onto the tree of life, which would swap The Emperor and The Star in the above…
the precise set of circumstances behind this is a bit beyond my comprehension, but I do know that ascribing the Star the path from Chochma to Tiferet has the advantage of moving it away from the Hebrew letter attribution of Tzadi and to the letter attribution of He’
The second and fourth/final letter of the Tetragrammaton, attributed to “The Great Mother”.
The woman as conduit between the spiritual and earthly is a recurring theme in all of the female coded Trump cards, in the case of The Star the key is to consider what kind of manifestation is being invoked.
As with any card: one will come to their own conclusions through experience. I find the energy of the star to be particularly youthful and energetic. Again: marked by a not necessarily unhealthy narcissism and desire for recognition. I may just be biased by so much talk of rock stars, movie stars, etc.
But such stardom as we within American popular culture understand it may not be unrelated to stardom as Crowley and his ilk understood it.
Indeed: the astrological attribution of the Star is Aquarius — the water bearer—which is also the astrological attribution of the new aeon, and as of more recently, this Substack.
Our modern media and entertainment culture has been described as distinctly aquarian.
Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that Crowley understands the Aquarian age as one in which “Every Man and every Woman is a Star” moving freely in their own orbit, and in which “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”.
Such ethics seem the heart of selfish narcissism to some—and maybe they are—but they are also the ethics most naturally suited to America as a liberal democracy, dislodged from the social strata of the old world, in which every person has the burden and opportunity of making themself.
I’ll earmark it here to write more later on the occult aspects of American life, as well as Kenneth Anger’s related project in Hollywood Babylon (and elsewhere) of reflecting upon America’s movie star class as the closest thing we have to an aristocracy…and also the closest thing we have to a set of pagan gods.
L. Ron Hubbard picked up on the “Every Man and every Woman is a star” track in Crowley’s thinking and made it literal…
…although in the world of Hollywood and celebrity archetypes few match aquarian / The Star energy better than 2000s it-girl Paris Hilton, who I don’t think has anything to do with Scientology
Obviously The Star is a card of high relevance to the new aeon, and Crowley ends his section of the Book of Thoth on it with a lengthy excerpt from the Book of the Law underscoring this import.
On an aesthetic level, Crowley’s card presents us with femanine shades of purple and blue and recurring, jagged geometry.
Crowley has the below to say about such geometry, which I will quote in full given it’s complexity:
It will be seen that every form of energy in this picture is spiral. Zoroaster says, God is he, having the head of a hawk; having a spiral force". It is interesting to notice that this oracle appears to anticipate the present Aeon, that of the hawk-headed Lord, and also of the mathematical conception of the shape of the Universe as calculated by Einstein and his school. It is only in the lower cup that the forms of energy issuing forth show rectilinear characteristics. In this may be discovered the doctrine which asserts that the blindness of humanity to all the beauty and wonder of the Universe is due to this illusion of straightness. It is significant that Riemann, Bolyai and Lobatchewsky seem to have been the mathematical prophets of the New Revelation. For the Euclidian geometry depends upon the conception of straight lines, and it was only because the Parallel Postulate was found to be incapable of proof that mathematicians began to conceive that the straight line had no true correspondence with reality.
On a personal level, relating to my experience over the summer of manifesting the star, it has become symbolically relevant to my own discerning of True Will.
It has become clear to me that in my time of Saturn Return… and also just as a Sag sun, Cancer moon (if you ask certain people at least)…. that this is a major source of uncertainty and confusion right now.
The reasons for The Star’s relevance are personal, and pertain to a desire for recognition and success I still have to unpack ethically and existentially.
But one thing is clear: considering a card so rooted both to the new aeon and the auspicious settling of matters is a worthy place to start.
The Video
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On the song:
The greatest song by a band too often dismissed as hipsters for being too mainstream or radio friendly. Probably the greatest song that could be aptly described as “post-grunge”, and an exemplar—with its emotive melody— of the early connection between the maligned genre and emo. One of the great rock songs of the 90’s hard stop.
Musical Reference Points for The Star:
Not many things command my attention like a new post notification by you 😄 (loved it and especially interested in your future earmark segment).
Everlong 💯