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II THE GREEN ANGEL

Questions

Just like the first spread, this second method of laying the cards is appropriate when you have no concrete questions but would simply like to forage in the primal ooze of your unconscious mind. Use it to discover who you are outside of who you believe you are – beyond the ego with which you only identify to a limited degree because you suspect that someone else also exists here. If “Baphomet” (I) shows you what portion of your inner images you bring into a situation, “The Green Angel” personifies the images that the subconscious mind reflects back to you from the situation: These are the dark unconscious formations that are dramatized through your directions in the past.

Allegory (The Green Angel)

For a moment I am once again the one who sits at the writing desk staring into the crystal ball. Just for a brief fleeting moment I once again change into my forefather, John Dee, and stray into the oldest and most depraved quarter of Prague, not knowing where my feet will take me. I have the vague need to dive down into the muddy bed of the nameless, unscrupulous, irresponsible rabble that passes its mindless days in the pleasure of smoke-enveloped instinct and is only happy when belly and lechery are satisfied. What is the end of all endeavor? Weariness … loathing … doubt. The feces of nobility and the excrement of the mob are one and the same filth. The King digests the same things as the sewer sweeper. What an error to look up to the imperial in the Prague Castle as if looking up to Heaven! And what comes from the heavens? Fog and rain and the endless filthy watery snow. For hours I have waded through heavenly excrement that fell down sticky from the leaden heights. Heaven’s digestion: repulsive, disgusting, revolting. I notice that I have descended into the ghetto, to the exiled among the expelled: the asphyxiating stench of a people mercilessly assembled into a couple of laneways who beget, give birth, grow, and then die layered upon the putrefying dead in its graveyard. Living soul stacked upon living soul like herring in darkened spires. And they pray and await and crawl until the knees are bloody, and wait and wait … hundreds and hundreds of years for the Angel … for the fulfillment of their promise …

What is your praying and waiting, John Dee, your belief and hope in the promises of the Green Angel, when compared to the waiting, believing, praying, expectation and hope of these wretched Hebrews? And God, the God of Isaac and Jacob, Elias and Daniel – is he no less a faithful God than his servant from the west window?

A burning desire overcomes me to seek out the great Rabbi Löw and question him about the terrible secret of waiting for God …

I know, somehow I know: I stand incarnate in the humble room of the cabalist Rabbi Löw. We have spoken of the sacrifice of Abraham and the unavoidable sacrifice God that demands from those who he wants to make his blood relatives... Dark and secretive words I have heard concerning a ritual knife that can only be seen by those whose eyes have been opened to those things of the other world invisible to the mortal human being: things more real and of greater consequence than things on Earth, which can only be suggested to the blind seeker through the signs of letters and figures. These mysterious words from the toothless mouth of an old madman cut me to the quick! Mad? Mad like his friend high up there in the castle … the imperial Rudolph von Hapsburg! Monarch and ghetto Jew: brothers in the secret … both gods in the laughable trumpery of their appearance … what is the difference?

At my request, the cabalist drew my soul into his. I asked him to transport my soul. He refused; he said that it would crumble if he did so. It had to cling to his soul, which had become transcendental from the body belonging to the mortal world. Oh, how these words made me think of the silver shoe of Bartlett Green. Then Rabbi Löw touched me on the collarbone, like the petty thief in the prison of the Tower had once done. Then I see … see with the tearless, peaceful, imperturbable eyes of the old Rabbi … I see my wife Jane kneeling before Kelley in the same room of the house opposite “am Ring.” She believes she is struggling with him for my happiness, for gold, and the Angel. Kelley does not have access to the keys in my safekeeping, and therefore wants to use a crowbar to take the book and bullets from my trunk. He wants to slip out of Prague with his spoils under the cover of darkness and fog, leaving us in the grip of poverty and wretchedness. Jane protects the trunk with her body. She negotiates with the scoundrel. She pleads, and does not know what she is doing.

I … smile!

Kelley makes all sorts of objections. Blatant threats alternate with cunning; coldly hatched plans with feigned compassion. He sets conditions. Jane says “yes” to each one of them. Greedier glances touch my wife. The cloth covering her breast tears open as Jane kneels before him. Kelley fights her hands as they seek to restore order. He looks down at her Fire bathes his head.

I … smile!

He lifts up Jane. His grip is lascivious, shamelessly. Jane weakly admonishes him. Her fears for me steal her courage away.

I … smile!

Kelley is persuaded. He makes all things of the future dependent upon the commands of the Green Angel. He makes Jane swear that, like him, she will pledge obedience, obedience to the command of the Angel until death and beyond, no matter what this may be. Only in this, he threatens, would there be rescue. Jane takes the oath. Fear lends her face a deathly pale color

I … smile; but a keen and acute pain slices through me like a razor-sharp slaughter knife. I feel it … through the lifeline. It is almost like a deathly thrill...

Then, I see the ancient, peculiarly tiny child’s face of the High Rabbi Löw, furrowed by fear, suspended freely before me in the air. He says:

“Isaac, the knife of God is at your throat. But in the thornbush writhes the lamb in your place. Be as merciful as ‘He’ if you one day take a sacrifice; be compassionate like the God of my forefathers.”

Darkness passes over me like an army of blind nights, and I feel the memory of what I have seen with the eyes of the Rabbi’s soul fade and disappear. It stirs me like a bad dream.

Gustav Meyrink: The Angel of the West Window.

(The First Look in the Magic Mirror)

Interpretation

1 John Dee (The Image of the Ego)

The first card shows the ego that acts from its own center and perceives and constitutes itself in its own actions.

2 Jane (The Image of the Other)

The second card describes the unconscious attraction to the aspect of the opposite sex that you have estranged within yourself. It is not the feminine that John Dee loves in Jane, but rather the feminine part in himself. That is why this card is less representative of the hope of capturing others than of the lost part of ourselves, which we hope to recapture in others.

3 Edward Kelley (The Image of the Id)

Here you meet the shadow or your dark inner specter, which you do not willingly want to acknowledge. Only people who have already encountered their own shadow feel secure in being close to the devil. For he embodies an element of truth deeply rooted in our instinctive nature.

4 Rabbi Low (The Image of the Superego)

The fourth card corresponds to the inexorable striving for freedom from natural compulsions. It allows you to search unflinchingly for the pure form of love that ultimately can only be found in the divine. This card also shows you the mask behind which your repressed drives and instincts are concealed. It is the conscious self that fights Evil behind the mask of the father figure (card 3), who is only attributed with wrong so that the self can feel justified in destroying him.

5 The Green Angel (The Darkness)

In the search for an all-encompassing love, you encounter here – in spite of your personal illusions – the multifarious primal perversions in the realm of instinct all too often concealed behind the pretty mask. For the Angel is the mirror into which you encounter what is deeply founded and glimpse the ogre through which you now recognize yourself.