Side Notes
by BB Soto
The thoughts that don’t make the main text—but matter anyway ♥️
All Side Notes
Tarot Symbolism & The Masculine
My bachelor’s in art history means I spent a great deal of time in my youth studying the history and mythology of Greece. Take any survey art history class in America and you will too. The Greeks are kind of a big deal in that field of study. They made many contributions to Western art. Like, a lot.
But when my husband and I honeymooned in Greece, no one warned us about the penises.
Tarot Symbolism: Duality
In the Anglo-American tarot tradition, the Fool is the beginning and the end. Therefore the Fool is also neither the beginning nor the end.
The Magician points one hand skyward, another to the earth, all to illustrate that as above, so is below. The robed figure actively manifests awareness into reality. They are surrounded in earthy colors associated with consciousness, daytime, and masculine energy.
Tarot Symbolism: The Rose (& Lily)
Would it surprise you, though, to learn that this most common of meanings for rose is related to neither the Fool nor the Magician card? Not beyond that, the white rose the Fool holds represents that innocent, pure, blank canvas suggestion of the roses stained red with Aphrodite's blood. The Fool holds a white rose to let us know this is the beginning, the fresh, the existence prior to the change. And in many cultures, white flowers are customary funeral flowers, associating them with death, too. In fact, we see the white rose reemerge on the flag thirteen cards later with Death. Death being the ending that brings about rebirth, a new beginning. The Fool is that new beginning.
Tarot Symbolism: The Magician
Striking yellow, rich red, and pops of white catch the eye in the first official card of the Major Arcana. The Magician — unlike the insensate Fool who both begins and ends the Major Arcana — is standing in the conscious plane. Where the sun, representing consciousness, rose in the sky above and behind the meandering Fool, the Magician here is surrounded by the light of awareness. They are robed in pure intentions (white) and sparked with the life force, the passion, the vitality to manifest their destiny (red). The tools of the four suits, the four elements, and the four states of being are laid out before them now. They are the alchemist experimenting with creating the possibilities of creating through divine awareness.