Offering: March 5, 2022

A wizard with a balsam vial

Image description: A woods in rural Pennsylvania in late winter with cut-outs of four characters from Pamela Colman Smith’s Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are Queen of Swords, Judgment, Eight of Swords, The Magician.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

This week, back home after a couple months in rural Pennsylvania, I told a very abbreviated, fifteen-minute version of Parzival to a Tarot Reading class. It was the first time I’d told an old story in months. 

I’ll admit that telling a story by heart makes me feel powerful. Like sprinkling a space with rubies, or heirloom seeds. It made me miss the days when, weary from book writing and early pandemic quarantine, I’d walk the Oakland hills alone, telling Italian and Sardinian folk tales out loud. Feeling sure that I’d found my true calling.

That spring, I applied to a masters program in poetics of imagination taught by myth teller Martin Shaw, which would start that fall in west England. In my personal statement for the application, I wrote: 

“Lately I’ve been saying that my dream is to be an old woman with the perfect tale for every occasion and hair to my waist. Not the kind that hangs to hide feelings but the kind where there’s a different shade for each one. The kind I only let down on the second day of telling a three-day epic, for the real ones who stuck around. Right now I don’t know how to tell any stories longer than twenty minutes. But I love a good thing that takes ages.” 

I got into the program but decided not to go. I’d left California late that summer and, once back on the East Coast, I think I started to feel old stories were frivolous, self-indulgent. The whimsical culture of the Berkeley hills where I’d lived was like a fairytale world; speckled fawns looking like spiders as they chased their mothers on fragile, new legs, fluffy yellow wands of mullein bursting through wire fences, low-hanging apricots with sneaky neighbors names all over them, thick foggy mornings that just let sadness be, and a yipping coyote chorus that you could count on, at bedtime. 

That place was good soil for this emerging part of myself to activate and sprout. But planted back East, it was just different. I do miss the dream though. Telling Parzival on Sunday reminded me that I still hope to be an old woman with a tale for every occasion (Queen of Swords). The Monday after class, I needed a morning alone in bed reading folk tales. 

Because of these Offerings, for better or worse, when I read I keep an eye toward what I’ll make that week. One of the judgments I often have about working with folk and fairy stories is that it can feel avoidant, or escapist. There is a voice in me who’s favorite thing to say is, come on, how privileged do you have to be to think this is relevant or useful to anyone or anything other than your own need to play make believe?

Maybe a week ago I spent a night re-reading and taking notes on the letter about The Magician in Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot. There are a few parts to it, but the part that feels most salient in this moment is the one where Tomberg connects The Magician with analogy. 

Analogy is a practice of seeing correspondences. With practice, it begins to happen more frequently, as if automatic. And since working with symbol, including Tarot, is all about analogy, it makes sense that The Magician would be number one, the first card in the Major Arcana. The ability to use analogy is a prerequisite for working with every other card. 

Since Meditations is rooted in Hermetic philosophy, Tomberg draws on the tenet, “that which is above is like to that which is below and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of (the) one thing.” To me this says that analogy isn’t just about identifying any old random correspondence (assuming randomness exists), but specifically those which connect the micro and macro, a small self with something greater. Below with the above and vice versa. 

This orients me. Because if I see meaning-making as a way to access an experience of collectivity, that gives me something to hold onto in terms of purpose. For sure it can feel frivolous, or for its own sake. But maybe this orientation is the move that elevates meaning-making from mere intellectuality to something more closely resembling a spiritual practice. If analogy connects that which is below with that which is above, it becomes transformative; it dissolves the otherwise taken for granted barriers between a small self and a whole. 

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All of this is to say that I allow myself the morning alone reading stories. I pick Italo Calvino’s anthology, Italian Folk Tales off the shelf, knowing I have an Offering to make and hoping to find some doorways. 

Having spent all that time with The Magician last week, I start by looking at the table of contents for stories on magic. I’m positive there are some, but none that explicitly say so in the title, so I go for a tale with an intriguing name: “The Wife Who Lived on Wind.” I read it, and then I read the next one.

I go back to my bookmarked place; I’ve been making my way slowly through the stories from the first one, “Dauntless Little John,” which was also the first story I learned to tell by heart. I settle on one I’ve read before called “Pome and Peel.” 

In it, two brothers weasel their way into a wizard’s compound—by hiding in a Trojan-style brass horse—to impress the wizard’s beautiful daughter with song and dance. (I realize only later that I’d found my “magician” story.)

The brothers convince the wizard’s daughter to leave with them, and the three wheel out in the brass horse, with the kind of raucousness and joy that make a bitter man mad. 

When the wizard realizes she’s gone he curses his wayward daughter, fists in the air, beard blowing back into the night, shouting out over the balcony as angry wizards are wont to do. 

The wizard’s curse holds that his daughter will encounter three horses—a white, red and black one—and, unable to resist, she will jump on the white horse and it “will be her undoing.” 

If for some reason that doesn’t work, she’ll come across three dogs—a white, red and black one—and with her love of dogs she will surely pick up the black one and it, too, will be her undoing. 

And if that doesn’t work, a giant snake will come through the window while she sleeps, and that’ll do it. 

Three fairies happen to be nearby as the wizard is screaming all this. Stopping at an inn later that night, the fairies see the wizard’s daughter with the brothers, Pome and Peel. All three are fast asleep, or so they seem. 

The fairies start to chat about what they’ve witnessed. They name each curse and then say, but “if some far-seeing soul were present, he would cut off the horse’s head at once…cut off the puppy’s head at once…cut off the snake’s head” and the wizard’s daughter would be saved. But, they add, whoever breathes a word of the curse or of the antidote, would turn to marble at once. 

Something in life has taught Peel never to fully rest and so he hears everything the fairies say while feigning sleep, and sets out in the morning with his travel buddies. Sure enough, there are three horses waiting, white, red, and black. 

The wizard’s daughter jumps on the white one, and Peel beheads the horse immediately. Of course, he can’t explain why. Then the same happens with the dogs, and after beheading a puppy it’s clear why Peel is growing increasingly alienated from his friends. Who, by the way, meanwhile have decided to get married. 

On the night of their wedding, Pome and the princess go to sleep, and Peel, knowing what’s about to happen, stands watch in a dark corner by the window, for the serpent. The serpent arrives right on time and having lost his head, recoils and vanishes into the night. 

But when the bride wakes from the noise and sees Peel by the bed with his sword, and having pardoned him twice for murder already, she assumes herself to be his next victim and in terror, begs he be put to death.

Peel is put in prison and set to be killed. Faced with death, somethings in him shifts. “Doomed whether I speak or keep silent,” he says, “I choose to speak.” He tells the wizard’s daughter everything.

And sure enough, bit by bit his body turns to marble. He stutters as his jaws turn hard. Realizing her mistake, the wizard’s daughter writes her father and begs him to forgive and to help her. 

The wizard comes at once, with a balsam vial. Even though he was the one who cursed her in the first place, he is moved by Peel’s sacrifice to save his daughter’s life. As he brushes Peel’s hardened body with the balsam elixir, the young man’s senses return as his body is flesh again. 

There is music and song and chanting: Viva Peel! Viva Peel!

—

Last year I received two copies Audre Lorde’s collection, Your Silence Will Not Protect You, the second from lauren jones of yes, please, a book house and care space in Atlanta. The book is named after a line in a paper Lorde presented called “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” at a 1977 conference of the Modern Language Association in Chicago. The address, which Lorde gives less than two months after she’s told she needs to have a mastectomy, and does, is the very first piece in the book. 

Before she learns that the tumor is benign Lorde says that her “priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences…And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.” 

In Peel’s story, he is afraid to name what’s happening and so he goes on killing. And while his eventual truth-telling does have a redemptive quality—he’s brought back to life by the wizard with the balsam vial (Judgment)—it’s not a moment before he faces the thing he’s feared most, which is death. As it turned out for him, silence was going to kill him just the same as speaking up would. They were two paths to the same destination, though they were not created equal. 

These images illustrate a kind of leveling that I think Lorde was getting at. They suggest that sometimes, when we keep quiet in fear of death, our silence doesn’t do what we think it will. It’s Peel’s willingness to face down that fear of turning to stone that leads to his ultimate salvation. But it’s not just any salvation. It is specifically one that involves coming back to one’s senses. That feels like it matters. 

I don’t think I believe in absolutes when interpreting images, but I will say that for me, the absolute best and most important image in this story is the wizard with the balsam vial. It points directly at something that is needed in order to do two very hard, if not impossible tasks: 1.) to speak truth safely and 2.) to re-sensitize where one has become hard. 

As is the case with all symbol, I think, the balsam vial gives essence without specifics. It is generative because it leaves us with more questions than answers. Like what is our version of this magic elixir that can both make it safe to say what needs to be said and bring mobility to stuck things.

Lorde said that, “The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.” If speaking truth and moving where one has been stuck is equal to a revelation of self, that makes anything less make believe, or untrue. 

And it will always seem fraught with danger (Eight of Swords) whether it is, or it isn’t. But even though, said Lorde, “we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

As a writer and reader I believe in the power of ideas; that something said just right can be moving, activating, dispersive. Like being brushed with the contents of a balsam vial. I think Lorde’s words, which remind us that there are consequences to being more loyal to fear than the need to be truthful, are like this. 

Reading her words on silence and fear could like brushing oneself with balsam; I personally feel summoned out from the shell of self-protection and into sensitivity, a willingness to be vulnerable. Lorde’s framing of fearlessness as luxury is another way of saying that fear is the price you pay to get in the presence of what it is that you love. That fearlessness is rarely granted prior to doing something scary, and you and I are no exception.

—

In some strands of psychotherapy there’s a thing called “doing the opposite” where a person practices doing the opposite of what their thoughts or feelings are telling them to do. I like to call this what it is to me, which is magic, because in my own life it has felt, many times, like a miracle to go against that grain. 

Interestingly, the wizard himself gives an example of this when he comes to the rescue. Remember, he was the one who cursed his daughter to begin with. That he rushes to save the man who thwarted his abusive project defies every law of attachment to one’s efforts, to ego and to pride. But he’s a wizard. He can do miracles, go against all that, and so he does what needs to be done in service of life. Regardless of his small and ultimately not that significant feelings. 

Before telling the truth there is often a cost-benefit analysis that happens on the part of the would-be truth teller. It wasn’t worth it for Peel to speak up until it was clear that not doing so was going to cost him his life. But that was in large part he didn’t see the possibility of a miracle waiting in the wings, of the wizard in the background somewhere, capable of moving differently than anyone had expected. 

And I think this points to an interesting reality, that a cost-benefit analysis is always constrained by the limits of what we can know in a given moment. As such, it tends to overlook miracles, and factors we just can’t be sure of, like other people, and how, just like us, they’re constantly changing. Like us, becoming more and sometimes less capable of rising to an occasion. 

At first, it appears that Peel’s truth telling yields a punishment that is actually worse than death; whereas with death, his body would go into the Earth and become food for new life, in being turned to marble he is robbed, even of that. But at the end of the day, he’s rewarded. Brushed with the balsam elixir, re-sensitized, revivified. He stays human. He does not go cold or numb and get stuck there. In this way, the lesson does seem neat: Terrifying as it might be to speak truth, silence is death.

I think I want to say a lot more about this story, but it’ll be good to let it hang out in my frame a bit so I’m going to let you go, until next time. 

This is a subscribers-only paid Offering, but if you feel moved to share it you have my fullest blessing! Thank you so much for your support and for being here.

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Sources

Anonymous. (2002). Meditations on the Tarot: A journey into Christian hermeticism. TarcherPerigee.

Lorde, A. (2017). Your silence will not protect you. Silver Press.

Calvino, I. (2013). Italian folk tales. Mariner Books.