II Ecstasy

I often think of the first six of the Major Arcana cards as a set of balancing pairs, The Fool and The Magician - innocent unknowingness and consumate skill, Ecstasy and Wisdom - the female and male divine connections, and The Universal Mother and Father - the female and male earthly connections. In my younger days, when I first made the aquaintance of tarot, I saw no particular relation to The Fool and the Magician because I thought of The Magician and The High Priestess (Sacred Earth, Seven Element's Ecstasy card) as a matched set because, as a youth I lacked the scope I came to acquire with learning and the passage of time. As a youth I missed the Magician's very real connection to the physical world. I knew nothing of the powers of manifestation and could not see his role as being very much the opposite of The Fool he follows. Both ways work for being in the world. Both have very much to do with consciousness and state of mind.

Ecstasy and her balancing card, Wisdom (the former Hierophant) have to do first with the Body because they have to do, not with making things happen in the world but with maintaining the connection with Spirit which allows us to live lives of integrity. I can understand why some of you may be wondering why it is that I say that Body is the true connector to Spirit and not Mind. We are used to using our minds to such an almost exclusive degree in interpreting the world around us that we are skewed in the very mental direction of supposing that because we are using the mind to interpret reality, that it is, in fact, the best way to go...and it isn't.

Why? Easy. Ego.

Ego is born of the mental processes and it infuses so much of the neural programming that has made us who we are into every thought we think that it is never - and I use the word advisedly - never as clear as it might best be for relying on it to the degree that we do. The Body, on the other hand, is pure animal stuff. Oh, it carries the same programming that created the Mind processes but what it doesn't carry are all the machinations the Mind evolves to get around that programming. The Body doesn't have an Ego. The Mind helps us to stay sane, helps us to overcome all sorts of things we need to overcome to function in the world but it doing so, in focusing on the detours to get around the road blocks, it tends to forget why it is on the detour in the first place. The Body has that information. The Body never forgets. Consequently, that is where the real information about us lives, in our bodies, not in our minds.

Ecstasy represents the female aspects of Body Wisdom. She represents surrender to the animal self in a way that is most completely known only to those embodied as females on this earth. Through her surrender to the animal self she touches the Divine. In touching the Divine she touches her own Spirit Self and in doing that, she rests comfortably in knowingness.

It is that knowingness that allows the Body to be Spirit's perfect partner. The Body knows why you are here, knows exactly what the Spirit that is sharing its space had in mind when it embodied, but the mind is not to be trusted in relaying that information to you. So, how do you gain access to that very critical information? Again, easy. Feelings.

Feelings are the language of the Body and, while we have words to describe many feelings, the subtleties of feeling are so complex and so interwoven that we could never hope to have even as many words for them as the Eskimo had for snow. It is our feelings, though, to which we must listen because it is our feelings which are always letting us know which way to go. We know when something doesn't feel quite right, yet we have a very real tendency to allow our minds to overrule those feelings. Ecstasy doesn't. Ecstasy is perfect action in accordance with the perfect information the Body supplies. Ecstasy knows, goes, grows and in doing so comes to bliss.

Mastering this art is one of many reasons why we're here.