There's No Courage Without Fear
What's in between The Magician and The High Priestess?
The Major Arcana is the journey of The Fool from Card 1 (The Magician) to Card 21 (The World). In this series, I am exploring “the space between” each card, the shift that happens when The Fool goes from one card to the next — thoughts s/he has while driving on the highway, so to speak. First up is the space between The Magician (1) and The High Priestess (2).
The other day at work, after a joy-zapping discussion about the Epstein Files, a co-worker tried to salvage the vibes by changing the subject to Alex Honnold, a man who climbed up to the top of a skyscraper in Taiwan without any ropes or safety equipment. The event was broadcast live, far from the bubble of my particular algorithm, so I had no idea it had happened.
I’m inclined to dismiss this sort of thing as self-indulgent exhibitionism at worst, and mental illness at best. But instead, I was deeply moved. If the opposite of doomscrolling exists, this is it.
In the clip above, Honnold tells the interviewer that it was not the height at top that was terrifying, but the part in the middle. The part that seems the most boring to us is the part that is the most difficult for him. Notably, his wife was on the inside of the building on the 65th floor, there to wave at him when he crossed. I wonder if this was deliberate.
The spectacle reminded me of Man on Wire, the documentary about French funambulist Philippe Petit. Shot like a heist film, the movie follows Petit as he plans a very illegal and dangerous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, in 1974. (Both Alex Honnold and Philippe Petit are Leo suns, go figure – who else would be willing to risk a humiliating and painful death for the sake of putting on a good show? Who else recognises the value of courage that wholeheartedly?)
The Magician – like Honnold, like Petit – is a performer; he expands your view of what’s possible. Not probable, but possible. The Magician takes four random objects on a table and tries to turn them into something you’ll never see coming. That’s all ‘magic’ really is, at the end of the day: a welcome surprise. It shows you that your world is actually bigger than you thought it was.
Because magic and surprise are so linked, it can get stale and boring really fast. A performer who starts off wanting to give the audience a good return on investment might end up just performing out of routine. Maybe their desire for validation starts to overtake their love of show business; or maybe they just stop feeling so special. It doesn’t help that as a culture we seem to have some sort of bloodlust towards, or secondhand shame about, people who display their desire for attention in unsubtle ways (‘being cringe’). Humiliation lurks at every corner, ready to pounce.
The High Priestess comes after The Magician to clarify why we, The Fool, are on this journey – what exactly are we trying to manifest in our lives? Any why is it so important to us? Because if we are acting with a conviction rooted in something deep, possibly divine, then humiliation is useful rather than scary. It can be a way of showing us what might not be working, or how to stand up for ourselves. The Magician expels a lot of energy in order to put on his show and cast his spells, making himself quite vulnerable to insecurity and failure. So The High Priestess follows him to say: The performance has got to be deeper than that, my friend. It’s not enough to just point one finger to the ground and expect the Divine to cough up magic every single time. You need to spend some time in shadow to learn what scares you. If The Magician embodies the courage to do something risky, then The High Priestess embodies the fear than needs to be mastered in order for the magic to be successful.
In Transcendental Meditation, practitioners meet with an expert who gives them a personalised mantra to chant daily. That’s essentially what the High Priestess does too: She gives you a tool for navigating the unknown with a calm, cool head, so you can integrate fear rather than ignore it. Because there is no courage without fear.
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