..dictated through Rosalind Sharpe
Rosalind Sharpe (1918–1991) was an artist, writer, astrologer and clairvoyant who participated in the 1960s sessions with John Starr Cooke that brought through the New Tarot for the Aquarian Age.
Rosalind is an extremely important figure in the history of the New Tarot, and she played a highly significant role in its formulation and production into the field of humanity. More will be said of her in future articles for Royal Maze.
Rosalind co-authored (with John Starr Cooke) the 1968 booklet T: The New Tarot for the Aquarian Age. Included in this book is a description of the Path of the Tarot, “in which it is represented in sequence, as beads upon a string.”
The text says it was “given through automatic writing May 27, 1968, by one of the authors, Rosalind Sharpe.” As such, “it does not represent her personal opinion but is offered as it is for what it is. No one knows the source of automatic writing. It may come from the unconscious or even the super-conscious. Whatever the source, it may contain valuable hints.”
“Valuable hints”(!) – that is indeed quite an understatement as we contemplate the insight-filled thought-provoking beauty of what she delivered back in that fateful year of 1968…
The Path of the Tarot
The Tarot is Truth and Truth is a fountain. It is Life – the never-failing source. Truth is Truth. Truth is the absolute mirror and the absolute creation. It is a lake that we gaze into – and it is the fire that burns and has ever burned on all altars. It is the hearth-stone as it is the torch.
And you and I, in life’s heart and being, are mighty fragments of Life’s heart – and it is that One alone that is the source and the water and the well-spring of all blessing. And the torch or the fire is our love for that One as we are consumed to a state of absolute purity in that One Being.
Love is the act of union and is the seal of all blessing.
One must ask with love, then it is freely given.
The new Books of Tarot were given to be read in this light and in this fashion.
First of all, let us say that the Mother of Creation is operating and that the Tarot is no longer guarded by the veiled high priestess of the ancient wisdom. She is Isis Unveiled. Let there be no further mysteries to Isis.
Month hastens to close. June opens with ronde [rounds?] of parties. Many rondes. My mantle will draw thee close. Month may mean whomever will meet me is ronde’s winner. But there will be no more disguises.
Silent question: Who am I?
Who may name the unnameable?
The Nameless One now enters the field. The Nameless One asks, “Who am I?” This is how he enters the journey. Mother of Creation is next. And she is the Creator. She spanned our flows before we knew an ocean or that there was a chasm to be bridged. She, the Nameless One, the author of our being, Mother, Creator, now Man, is born – and he becomes the Hanging Man. For he is caught in his dilemma of being two instead of one, and he feels nothing but compassion because he is the victim and only sufferer from the divided state.
This controlled torment of division causes him to seek for unity or wholeness of beingness outside himself, and thus the Virgin, once called the World, is born, and she becomes his Beingness. She is the anima, the projection, the birth of the self that is not yet however a true birth, for it is virgin and immaculate and thus although a flower not consummate.
And this Virgin Self, Beingness, must be penetrated or reach out and be entered by a greater Being before it can be joined and whole and become Unity which is the Divine Embrace or the consummation. This is the Book of Marriage, and in heaven it means the penetration of the Virgin by the male principle of Beingness.
Rondes may be lost on this theme for people do not understand the difference between male and female beingness. Originally all Being is female in that it is virgin and unbrided and waiting for consummation or the entry of the male principle, and it is by the acceptance of the Greater One that this is known and can be entered upon and then and only then is one in a position to give birth to that which follows. And that was the Victorious One.
But then we must turn to the Way-Shower upon the path or the star to light us, and that Star, like the star of Bethlehem, foretells the birth of the Christ child or the Second Birth. And lo the message was said and heard even by the cocks who cried at dawn that all rivers were flowing from heaven to earth and lo… and man heard and rejoiced. Beingness had had its day. He was no longer a child.
He became the Doer of Right Action, and he stood in the Sun with the Book of Life held out before him for all to see and read while he stood rejoicing and the horses of will and passion were on either hand, one strengthened by the light, the other subdued to his hand’s gentling.
And behold as he held forth the Book of Life to be read there appeared Error, the Thinker, for now in reading back his own message he became confused by it and sat in a tree in meditation unable to budge. The Thinker, wherever he occurs, slows up all processes of motion and impedes progress by casting doubt and naming differences. The doubt is the doubt of his own words. He has written them for they are his very own words, and he can take them no more seriously than as the stutterings of a seven year old child, which he is; and so then the winged one came as a messenger from heaven and brought him to the Citadel of Completed Man, revealing it in one stroke. The Book was forgotten as the living tree was found and followed to its ultimate end.
For once man had become completed man he became the Seeker and at last was on the path that would lead him ultimately to the fire at the mountain-top or the crown chakra of the Citadel. Now that he sees the goal, he is on the right path and is going in the right direction. This goal is the Death of Self. The merging into the infinite Being or the realized God-head-the Christ-child heralded by the Way-Shower.
The first action that occurs on his path up the mountain is the knowledge that all actions are a mask of the One, and that he does not act, but It does, and that all events are timed from within that source, and that Source is the Feeler, the Prime Mover, who is the bridge between Man and the Divine or the Web of the creation. Thus she is symbolized by Cancer, the heavenly Crab or Divine Spider. The Mother of Creation and of all maya. She is the ocean and she is life’s longing for itself. She is the moon, the spell of binding, and as such she entraps only to lead into more subtle bindings, and thus she leads us into the Maze of Destiny which she has spun by her feelings and bindings and cosmic threads, her inter-timings and collections on life’s shores.
And in this labyrinth we wander, the castles of the Moon, guarded by the two lions that brought them into being: the passive Actor and the active Feeler. For in this reversal, the female element again predominated over the male element but this time with the silvery bindings of the Moon and the umbilical cords of her infinite womb.
Thus in the Maze there seem no entrances nor exits until is perceived the Deliverer: which is the fire that burns away all dross and thus releases us from bindings and further bindings and from time’s mesh of which the threads of Destiny are composed. It was to find this web and be free of it that the Deliverer entered with his sword, and his sword was the golden serpent of the upright phallus, and the instrument of his deliverance the fire which was his circumcision or severance from the womb. And the fire he drinks, and it enters his vitals and he is free of the web of time and of the castles and silvery sands of the beaches of the Moon which might otherwise forever hold him – cool and sensuous yet unawakened to the true light; for in the light of the Moon the Sun has not yet risen; and as death it is that which is to come or the breaking of the seal, the revelation.
And thus came into existence the Changer who had mastered all destiny and held it hooded, captive on his shoulder, as he stood balancing upon the globe of the Manifestation or the Prime Mystery whose significance cannot be said; and even as he contemplated the iridescent pearl of the Mystery which is forever nameless and beyond the castles of the Moon, he found himself face to face with the Absolute Death: the VOID.
Suddenly the chimera bubble of the Manifestation vanished and his feet could no longer retain their slippery hold. His feet were no more. He knelt instead within the crown, staring at the face of death, the eye-sockets, however, not vacant but proclaiming eternal life. Life- behind Death – was this what the figure of the Renewer revealed and the cloud over the seven-rayed sun but veiled? Death, the Absolute; and in one mighty stroke to be free of all bindings and monstrosities and all of the kingdom of darkness, which is to say fostered by the light but nestered in darkness. And so Death, the Absolute, to be faced in awful majesty-and the masked figure and the blue flesh perhaps concealed no being behind it but only the death of the Self!
With this knowledge of the Absolute Void he was freed forever of the spell of the Moon and stepped forth as the new-born babe, having opened all the gates behind him. Having broken the seal of death, he had entered into the Kingdom, which is to say the One Being that knows no separate Self but is forever One Being and the One in Motion.
Rondes follow as the Donor comes and gives what has been earned by the Nameless One who embarked on his quest by asking, “Who am I?” – and having successfully gotten this far he has earned his reward; for his journey was not a lightsome one and he slew more than dragons when he entered the maze and found the deliverance at its center in the fire that consumed it.
The flame burned up, but now the Speaker says: It is Done. And in so saying, his mouth shoots forth doves and lightning bolts and all is changed and trembles upon his breath but in reality he is saying: Please give me that which I need. Give me my bread. For I hunger and I thirst.
And with this asking, the Reverser correctly channels flow. The rivers of fire and water are united. Deliverance now pours down to earth as benison [blessing], and the manifestation is Good, for it has been purified, and there is no longer any maze in it nor any Destiny but only the Here and Now.
And thus the Knower stands, his feet in the twin pools of water and fire, now both warming him as he hatches the cosmic egg within his heart and gives birth to the New Being beyond the Original Creation: the Nameless One.
Thus we have completed the circuit, but the Nameless One holds two scrolls, one not yet unfolded, and when this moment of the Knower comes there will be yet another scroll for the new creature to read in living symbols along his path.
The New Baby as yet unborn is of another genesis than ours, yet is hatched of our very selves and substance. He is: the God Man.
And thus, in the steps taken from the Nameless One to the Knower, we have come to a new moment in creation. And that moment is NOW, and it is the future, and its runes remain to be written but written as they are in letters of light and huge footprints on the sand, they will not resemble ours any more than do ours that of primordial man.
What has come about at this time in man’s history is a mutation; and it was the correct channeling of flows of the Reverser that enabled it to happen by a new process of reproduction or act of union beyond the phallus and the womb.
The new child IS as this age of mankind draws to a close. We have entered on a new revelation, and the old books may now be folded away and forgotten, for their purpose was to deliver precisely this: a new creature.