Cinema Symbolism 4 update
Part IV is coming along really well, and I am anticipating a Spring 2025 release. However, movies that still must be viewed include The Nun II, The First Omen, Late Night with the Devil, Immaculate, and Joker: Folie à Deux. In the meantime, here is a little teaser:
(Left) The Tarot’s Magician qua Mercurius is alchemy’s change agent and archetypal trickster, becomes Breakfast at Tiffany’s bewitching Holly Golightly (right, portrayed by Audrey Hepburn, 1929-1993), a paragon of the Magician’s feminine ambivalence because, in matters of the heart, Holly can never make up her damn mind. She impersonates the Magician’s arm posture–as above, so below–with her elongated cigarette holder as her wand. The clothes make the woman: dressed in Saturnian black, the alchemist’s lead, Holly is a melancholic who suffers from acute anxiety, the hellish “reds” indicating the rubedo is the nigredo, yet as a bunco artist, she easily manipulates the men in her life, bending NYC’s chic social scene to her will. Holly’s breakfast table mimics that of the Magician, complete with a rose–the Magician stands in a garden of white lilies and red roses denoting the Rosicrucian mysteries–linking Holly to the Greco-Roman goddesses of beauty, Aphrodite and Venus, and three of the four tools of the Magician, i.e., the four Tarot suits, also manifest, viz., the coin/pentangle qua pastry, the goblet qua cup, and the sword qua knife (only the rod is absent). Above the Magician is the lemniscate, which is the number eight turned sideways; applied to Holly Golightly, it represents the ogdoad, the sphere of divine wisdom, Sophia, who can also play the role of a duplicitous woman, a mountebank.
Robert W. Sullivan IV 