The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itself, or the individual who has mastered the art of manipulating the cards to divine their meanings. Yet, the Magician is a profoundly ambiguous figure. From one perspective, he is the Magus, piercing through the illusions of ceaseless becoming to glimpse the hidden depths of reality. From another, he is all surface without depth, a carnival huckster ready to empty your coin purse while you’re transfixed by his crystal ball. In this episode, JF and Phil continue their on-again, off-again journey through the major trumps with a discussion of the card that—deservedly or not—proudly calls itself Number One.

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REFERENCES

Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

Weird Studies, Episode 24 on “The Charlatan and the Magus”

Weird Studies, Episode 109 and Episode 110 on The Glass Bead Game

Weird Studies, Episode 179 with Lionel Snell

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneology of Morals

Louis Sass, Modernism and Madness

Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence

Richard Wagner, Parsifal

William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

Participation mystique

Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth

Leigh Mccloskey, Tarot Re-visioned