The Judgement arcana makes me think of John Coltrane—the archangel of Jazz—blowing his Sax on the album A Love Supreme. The archangel represents the power of a singular voice, awakening the dead and the living. Ultimately, we are judged by the sincerity, singularity, and depth of our unique voice—how we blow our own horn.
Judgment is also the arcana of resurrection, according to Valentine Tomberg. But what does this mean? And why does The Archangel blow his trumpet to wake the dead and judge them? Should we not just let the dead sleep? The fact is, we resurrect the dead all the time—we are possessed by the acts and visions of our deceased ancestors—we are made of DNA from beings who are long dead. Therefore, it is unsurprising that much of early religion involved ancestor worship and talk about reincarnation.
Judging the dead is how we separate the wheat from the chaff—preserving what we deem immortal and casting away what is transitory. For instance, we resurrect the dead when we read a book by a dead author—Shakespeare is constantly being reborn, while most writers fall into obscurity. Only the very rare being obtains immortality in the collective memory. But even if we don't become famous after we die, we still live on in the ripples we have created in others and the world. Death is the harvester; it judges what is essential for the future, preserves it, and lets the rest become compost.
Some cultures build great houses or pyramids to converse with the dead. There is something grotesque in their desire for permanence and eternal life in monumental displays—nevertheless, monuments show how powerful our relationship with the dead is. In relatively sane cultures, Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, the dead are left for the vultures to pick clean, their bones ground to a fine powder to throw in the river. This is accompanied by intense liturgical prayers, which are as much for the living as for the dead.
Liturgy is the traditional way of digesting the influence of the dead on us and freeing us from their psychic weight—which is why the Jews read the Kaddish prayer for eleven months after death. Without properly letting the dead die, souls risk becoming parasites or ghostly spectres that haunt us. For instance, a person haunted by their father may become exactly like their father, repeating the same mistakes and sins they vowed they would never make. A sense of gratitude and forgiveness for our ancestors, rather than resentment, can go a long way in making us psychologically sane on an individual and a societal level.
So what about resurrection and life after death? Let us dispense with literalism here. Jesus of Nazareth will not jump out of a grave sometime in the future. However, the wine is not the wineskin. Another messiah—or great religious figure with Jesus-like qualities—might very well “be born again” in the future. Resurrection is not about creating a zombie Jesus but bringing forward a new pattern of life and liberation from the old.
Zombies are a caricature of resurrection—they lack all judgement and follow only their appetite, devouring the consciousness of others. They are the creatures that cannot die or be reborn; they are what Gurdjieff called ‘machine man’, caught in a recurring loop of the same. As the ‘living dead’, they have a parasitic relationship with life, feeding without contributing. Today we are thronged with the living dead, the consumerist, and the ultimate zombies lacking all sense of meaning.
The remedy is proper rites of passage, which teach us to live and die—and to judge what is worthy and what is not. Rites of passage are how we traverse chaos and ‘rebirth’ ourselves. Today the internet has flooded our brains—dystopias and utopias abound—old gods are being resurrected, and new Gods are being born. How do we judge them? How do we decide what to accept or reject? We must learn to navigate these stormy waters and find a new spiritual being.
Good judgement tells us to take the magic of good religion and liturgy seriously again. We must listen to the voices of the dead, often more alive than our shrill contemporary voices, and when the flood comes, the coffins open, and everything is revealed—where will we be in our hearts and minds? This is the question the Judgment arcana asks.
This article is part of a consideration of our study group on symbolism and Psychomagic. If you want to become a member and join one of our study groups, please write to me at andrewpgsweeny@gmail.com or check out the events calendar below for more details.
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