I'd like to see you try and stop me

And... Continuing. I am not feeling awesome today - I was saying that I think the daily weather that lately encompasses all of the seasons every 24 hours is a monumental test. The Sky has gotten bored of just freezing us out every year and now we're being tested to see if we can bear the whole world's cycle every day - and if we can we'll deserve a spring. As it is, kinda sick today. Still, I have things to do, so I do them, sickness being a slight inconvenience and no object to the tasks at hand.

Today I get up to the Major Arcana #3 - which in my construction is the Schoolteacher. So here's my explanation.

The Empress is supposed to be universal fecundity, female ripeness, the mother of all. I kind of hate this idea. The whole cult of the mother - as it has been redefined by the Victorians and their followers - it's just grotesque and patriarchal. Don't get me wrong - I think it can come from a right place. I think the paleolithic humans who had no concept that sex was the origin of people - I think that they might have had an authentic cult of the mother. But in the modern context - I think it is gross. Motherhood is fine, but it's not emblematic of nurturing and care - just ask my mother - Or yours (Your Mom). And uh... tasteless jokes aside - I thought about a figure of constancy and nurturing, that brings you into the world. Really into the world. Sure - life. Life we won't denigrate and we won't speak against motherhood here. But who trains you to be in the world? Who gives you that life in society? In the world of thought? I went with the Schoolteacher as an emblem of this idea. That you are born, but not a person, that you are trained into the patterns of the world and that is you becoming a person. Because I want my #3 to be more terrestrial, more rooted in the Mundus. That's suggested by other interpretations - and heck - in the old form the Universal Mother gives physical form to souls - it's the translation of the ephemeral into the physical.


Since I almost default to materialism I put the Schoolteacher as the one who translates you from the physical to the intellectual - the self of knowledge. But this knowledge is kind of rigid - in the way that physicality is rigid. You die if you don't eat, you die if you don't breath - there are boundaries of life. So too in the intellectual training you get at school. You are bounded.

Abandoning the idea of universal motherhood - I was as well allowed to play fast and loose with gender - I guess I went all ambiguous - but to me the Schoolteacher is a lady - but I'm satisfied that it can be interpreted any way you want. She carries the ruler - which demonstrates the rigidity of ideas, an inch a meter -these are concepts that have a physical reality that is arbitrarily decided, but decided, defined and (insofar as is possible) absolute. The Schoolteacher doesn't make the rules, she teaches you the rules so you know. Attendant to the Ruler is the feather of Ma'at - the ancient ruler/measure/weight against which your character is judged. The Schoolteacher - the Schoolteacher judges you. Not whether you are bad or good - not what kind of person you are -but rather whether you are ready to begin the next phase of being a person. Whether you are ready to move forward. She has a lot going on - gatekeeper for the many. Nurturer and trainer of the world.

A couple of other things about the Schoolteacher that I've painted. Rider-Waite gives the Empress an ugly frock covered in Pomegranates (again! Again with the pomegranates!) They are meant to evoke, in his illustration, the goddess Persephone. This is an idea about seasons - which was the first thing to suggest the Schoolteacher to me. Aside from farmers and snow-plow operators I guess that Teachers are probably the most affected by the seasons - so incorporating ideas about seasons suggested the schoolteacher as an image. Still -the ugly pomegranate dress doesn't really refer to anything except mythology - it's just a goony costume that the Empress wears in a kind of fandom of greek myth. So true to form I made my schoolteacher goony and fannish and gave her Mr. Spock's jersey.


And right the Schoolteacher is giving you a system for understanding things. The Schoolteacher prepares you to exist in the world, not to be correct, exactly, but to understand the System, and to take a place in it. Another cue I had for choosing the schoolteacher was the 3rd Hexagram that the Duke of Zhou decided on - Difficulty at the Beginning - which I have sadly cast too often and never been happy to see -but which is also very suggestive of school, a beginning, a difficult one. For me anyway.

The empress is also supposed to be crowned with 12 stars - and that's... 12. Okay - tribes of Israel? Months? The Zodiac? I'm just going to put the stars up there - they probably mean months. But the Schoolteacher isn't wearing a crown. No.


I'm putting in Malkuth in there - because I like the idea - hermetic and kabbalistic - just to have them as referents.

And I include the Rivers - that appear in a few versions of the Empress card because I thought there should be a reference to Water - which the Empress is not closely associated with but there's an indication that the Schoolteacher has governance, or at least manifests the governance of the waters according to System.


So altogether this has been kind of a departure - but I like the 3rd and the difficult beginning as the place where momentum shifts, and the new begins. I learned a lot from teachers -but I learned also to go on my own and not thoughtlessly obey the common system.