“The Tarot figures, in various guises, are ever present in our lives. By night they appear in our sleep, to our mystification and wonder. By day they inspire us to creative action or play tricks with our logical plans.” – Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980. Two Tarot cards that came to life on 9/11. (Insert Top Left) The lightning-struck Tower, card XVI from the Rider-Waite deck, is the Twin Towers destroyed. Its background is black, linking it to the Devil card (see Introduction), which has the same dark setting. Alchemically, the Devil represents the nigredo phase, the psychological dark night of the soul, the blackening and decay stage of the Great Work, in which material reality needs to be purified to make way for something fresh, in this case, the new yet bleak Æon of Horus. The falling person to the left of the Tower is shaped like the Hebrew letter ayin ע, and the figure on the right forms zayin ז, producing 77, OZ, the Goat of Mendes, synonymous with the Devil card. The Tower betokens transformation, the shattering of illusions, and abrupt, discomforting, and unsettling change, indicating the shift from Pisces to Aquarius. (Insert Bottom right) The Hanged Man, signifying the mystery of death (of the old age) and the riddle of resurrection (of the new), also denotes the Tower’s transmogrification, death, and rebirth. The twelfth trump becomes The Falling Man, plummeting to his death, having jumped from the WTC’s North Tower. Like the Tower card, alchemy has been a critical influence on the interpretation (one of many) of the Hanged Man. Lévi described him as “the great and unique athanor, which all can use, which is ready to each man’s hand, which all possess without knowing it.” The athanor is an alchemist’s furnace; the first stage of making the Philosopher’s Stone culminated in the nigredo phase when the material in the alchemist’s vessel was destroyed by heating it and driving off vapor, which was regarded as its spirit or spark of life. Then, the haze was allowed to condense and saturate the dead material, resurrecting it in a new and improved form; on 9/11, death and destruction signaled the end of Pisces, Christ the fisherman, the sun reborn in Aquarius as Baphomet, the Saturnian Bleating Goat.
Robert W. Sullivan IV 