THE HIGH PRIEST BECOMES THE SPEAKER
The Speaker speaks.
From his mouth lightning bolts and birds shoot forth. The earth trembles. Volcanoes erupt. The land shakes. There are water- spouts. Flowers spring up before his feet.
Terrible are his eyes.
Mighty are his words.
The entire universe hangs upon them.
He stands unclothed, his feet encased in boots reaching to his ankles. On his breast is a shimmering heart, and he carries in his left hand a golden key, in his right a huge black ring.
He presents the greatest possible contrast to his predecessor, the High Priest or Heirophant. The Heirophant was silent. Before him knelt two robed figures. In one hand he held the mitre of spiritual authority. The other, extended in the gesture of blessing, was usually marked with a mystic cross. As intermediary, he stood between man and God. The guardian of a mystery, his lips were sealed. He was a fitting counterpart to the veiled, mysterious, inaccessible High Priestess.
Not so with the Speaker.
The Speaker is the speaking of One. It is of the rose bared in the desert. “Where the sands were, now is bared a rose …” The speaking of the Speaker is like an eruption and it is clear that his words are no mere speech. The significance of the Book is It is Done. With love, it is done when the Speaker is with you. The key to the Speaker is his shimmering heart – in other words love. But this is the transfigured heart. It is the heart of the One who drank the cup of fire. It is no longer tinged with the suffering that weighted down the Thinker, nor is it connected with redemption, the Hanging Man.
It is the heart of One, or the heart of hearts.
What then is the Word the Speaker speaks?
It is not the word nor is it a word. The point is that the Speaker must speak. And speaking is being, knowing and doing. His words are words that must be spoken. Once in the Kingdom, acting from within, the flow is direct and instantaneous.
Speaking is not passive. Words are an act and a necessity. Words spoken from within and from the heart are part of the One Motion. They are the Creative Word.
“The sands shifted … Where the sands were, now is bared a rose”.
What is the rose but the Tarot? And the rose is a symbol that has often been associated with the heart. The twenty-two roses of the Tarot plainly say that these twenty-two Books are Books of the heart.
Therefore the Speaker, with his shimmering heart, is one of the major signatures of the present Book of T. And it is interesting that he is as completely open and out-going as the Mother- Creator is in-going, concentrated on her creation. Together they form the great yin-yang current of these Books. As a pair, in the former progression, they both contained, but veiled, the Mystery. Here, neither is veiled; all is revealed. But she creates inwardly; he speaks and outs the creation.
The golden key in the left hand of the Speaker is the key of the heart – the heart that burdened the Thinker, and also symbolic of the keys that the baby, the Reacter, used to unlock the seven gates. The black ring in his right hand is a magnetic iron ring, related to the crown on the head of the Feeler – the black iron circlet which supported the symbol of love – and it is also related to Unity, to the circle of manifestation symbolized by the O, and to the globe, the Prime Mystery, on which the Changer balances. The fact that it is black means that it includes the entire material realm. This states that entry into the Kingdom does not imply a severance between what is called material and spiritual, but that they are joined in one never-ending circle of manifestation, or in the circuit of positive-negative energy.
This is another restatement of the great Yin-Yang.
The Kingdom of heaven is on earth.
The reality spoken of in these twenty-two Books of Tarot is not nirvana, nor a leaving of this world for another one.
Why then does the Speaker wear boots, keeping his feet from immediate contact with the earth? This means that although he stands upon the earth and manifests on earth, his level of being is a higher one. he is more that an initiate. He is a dynamo of awakened beingness. He is the great transformer and conductor of the current of energy into the world. And he is in motion. He is the seeming antithesis of the Actor who stands upon a stage wearing a mask and seeming very still and wordless as he performs the acts created by the Mind.
To do and be also means to speak, for the Word is an act of creation. God created the world by the Word.
And with his speaking, the Speaker is reversing the flow of energy which has been dammed up; for what has been received has been held, static, waiting for the positive-negative charges to join in one current. It is no longer a time for separations. It is a time for outing what has been given and that which arises. What the Donor gave through absolute Truth and the law of balance is being released by the Speaker in energy and force.
Mighty is the torrent.
And thus it is logical that the next Book is the Book of the Reverser.