For the Waldenses interpretation of that last card was—Triumph.
VI
Reason: 25
The slime rose up to criticize the work of art. "There you sit," it said, "serene and content in your ebony gloss—yet utterly useless. You think you are beautiful, but you are only a molded husk. You are glazed, but you are brittle and shallow. Where is there any softness in you? Where is that fine slippery resiliency that is the heritage of the commonest blob of grease? Where is the rippling undulation of fluid motion, the flexibility and warmth of dishwater? You lack the variety of size and shape and color that glorifies the contents of every garbage can. You cannot take flight in the soft air in the free manner known to every particle of dust swept from the floor. You cannot appreciate the refractive art of the dirty window pane in the sunlight. You can never immortalize your substance by leaving a pretty stain on the wall. And never, never will you bring that worthy satisfaction of a job well done that every human being obtains from cleaning up rubbish like me."
"You are not beautiful—you are a monstrosity."
The work of art listened and was ashamed. It fell off the antique table and shattered on the floor. The slime looked on as the housewife swept up the myriad fragments, all shapes and colors and sizes, and dumped them sadly into the wastebasket.
"Now you are beautiful," said the slime, and it vanished down the drain.
"Well," Satan said, "are you satisfied about the origin and nature of Tarot?"
"Yes," Brother Paul agreed. "It was some lesson. But how did I acquit myself in the matter of the wish?"
"You passed," Satan said frankly. "I thought I had you there for a while, caught between sin and torture, but you threaded the needle. Of course you compromised yourself somewhat by consciously misleading the Inquisition—but the point of the dilemma was that you were left not with a choice between good and evil—"
"But with a choice between evils," Brother Paul filled in. "That was the Hell of it."
"Precisely. Anyone can tell good from evil if he wants to in a limited situation; not everyone can comprehend evil well enough to deal with it sensibly. You did an excellent job, and I fear you are not destined to reside in Hell—but there remain two wishes. Often a person who surmounts the most devastating challenge succumbs to the minor one. Shall we proceed?"
What use was there in waiting? Brother Paul wanted to be through with this awful examination! "Proceed," he said, buoyed by his triumph. What could be worse than the medieval Hell he had just been through?
"Name your second wish."
"I wish to know the evolution and future of Tarot."
Satan flicked his tail with a snap like that of a whip. "So shall it be—"
"But not in physical incorporation!" Brother Paul cried. "I just want to perceive it, not live it!" Would Satan accept the modification? One physical experience of history had been more than enough!
"Very well. Bye-bye," Satan said, making a little wave with four fingers. That gesture, by any other entity, would have seemed effeminate.
Brother Paul felt himself rising. He looked down—and there was his body, standing in Satan's office. Satan and the furniture remained in place. As Brother Paul continued to rise, he saw the secretary's office too—she was cleaning her nails in the timeless manner of the type—and the surrounding rooms. He could see through the walls, focusing on any portion he wished, seeing that portion clearly: a variable X-ray vision.
So this was what soul travel was like! His aura had detached from the host body and was now traveling and perceiving by itself. He had, as it were, become one with the fifth suit of Tarot.
There were scores of offices—hundreds—thousands—too many to count. Each was a mere cell in the total, connected to its neighbors by vessels, forming cohesive larger organs. "And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom," he thought, remembering the words of the poet Auden. The whole mass formed into a monstrous building thousands of stories tall, irregular in outline, supported by two massive round columns—the shape of Satan Himself.
Then on up, out, he viewed the environs of Hell with its own myriad cells, each with its special tortures. And finally he burst into the bright day of the world. He was out of Hell at last—but only by the spirit.
Now he coasted to the continent of medieval Europe, aware of the date without knowing how, and to the city of Paris. Still he had no chance to look at it, for he phased in to the bedroom of the King. Charles VI was abating his melancholy by playing with his Gringonneur Tarot. The deck was pretty much as Brother Paul had edited it: twenty-two Triumphs, four suits, seventy-eight cards in all. The mere shadow of True Tarot, but a private victory for Brother Paul!
Because Charles liked companions for his gaming, he impressed his courtiers into Tarot playing sessions. It was fun for them; they became adept at inventing new interpretations for given cards and given spreads that catered to the King's ego. Soon more decks were made, and it became fashionable to play Tarocchi all over France, and Europe, wherever they could be afforded. Tarot became a status symbol. Quickly variations appeared, associated with special locales or interests. Some decks had as many as forty-one Triumphs—the word soon simplified to Trumps—consisting of the "basics" Brother Paul had retained plus twelve signs of the astrological zodiac, plus the four "elements" (he really had succeeded in eliminating the fifth one!), and certain Virtues. Some decks had eight suits. But none restored the particular cards Brother Paul had hidden: eight Triumphs and the entire suit of Aura.
The Waldenses, of course, knew the truth—but they never made it public. And so they survived despite persecutions and plagues, eventually surfacing as a legitimate Christian sect with branches all over the world, even in America. In later centuries, when heresy became respectable under the name of Protestantism, the secret could have been safely told—but by then it was no longer important enough to recall. Persecution had made the original Tarot what it was; in the absence of persecution, it faded. The truncated Tarot became a virtual property of the Gypsies and other fringe elements of society who used it primarily for fortune telling. And so the secret remained, forgotten at last even by the Waldenses themselves.
The development of printing at the end of the fifteenth century brought playing cards to the masses. But many people found the full deck too cumbersome. As the cards sifted down from the nobles and the rich to the poor, full pictures were too expensive. More cards were dropped until the deck returned almost to the original form that the Waldenses had hidden their illustrated lecture in. Of all the Trumps only the Fool remained, now called the Joker. Sometimes a blank replacement card was also provided, the manufacturer's unwitting ghost of the Ghost. The Knights were banished, reducing each suit to thirteen cards. Thus the peasant deck came to rest at fifty-three cards—the number of weeks in the year plus one for the fraction left over. The symbols of the suits metamorphosed to the peasant level too: Swords converted to Bells, Pomegranates, or Parakeets, and then to Spades (Tarot really did beat its swords into plowshares!), Cups to Roses and to Hearts, Wands to Acorns to Clovers later called Clubs, and Coins to Leaves and to Diamonds. German cards of 1437 depicted hunting scenes, with suits of Ducks, Falcons, Stags, and Dogs. A later deck had sixteen suit signs: Suns, Moons, Stars, Shields, Crowns, Fish, Scorpions, Cats, Birds, Serpents, and others. People played games called Trappola, Hazard, Bassett, and Flush; and they gambled avidly. The cards had come of age—at the lowest common denominator.
But the "complete" Tarot continued as a subgenre with a strong appeal to persons interested in the occult. In Italy, Philippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, loved cards and commissioned for a small fortune several expensive sets, including an elegant heraldic deck to commemorate the union of his daughter with the scion of Sforza in 1441. "Ah yes, the most beautiful of the classic decks," Brother Paul murmured soundlessly as he hovered, contemplating the cards in their original splendor. There was the Cardinal Virtue Justice pictured by a lady robed in a dress of spun silver, h
olding sword and scales, and in the background a knight galloping his charger. There was the Moon held by a lady's right hand while her left tugged at the cord securing her skirt: if the lunar symbol was too obscure for the viewer, the left hand made the female mystique somewhat more evident. Ah, woman: where would she be without her hinted secrets? And the card of the World, showing a walled city suspended between sky and sea. Cardinal Virtue Fortitude, showing a burly Hercules beating a lion with a club. Skeletal Death with his giant longbow. And Time with a bright blue cloak over a yellow tunic, hourglass in hand.
But Brother Paul could not stay. He had to move on, tracing the Tarot wherever it might lead. He saw a simplified, almost cartoon-figure Tarot emerge in Italy; this was easier for the peasants to understand, and it became very popular among the lowest classes. It was soon copied in France and called the Marseilles Tarot. Further variants developed over the decades, culminating in the famous Swiss Tarot classic of the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, the symbolism had suffered further degredation over the centuries, much of it by "iconographic transformation"—the misreading of the pictures and revised interpretation based on those misreadings. Time lost his hourglass and became the Hermit with a lamp, and the Hercules of Fortitude became a lady gently controlling the lion, the card labeled Strength.
Experts came along, vowing to restore the Tarot to its pristine state—but though the Inquisition had passed, they did not discover the missing cards. Count de Gebelin decided the Tarot was of ancient Egyptian origin, based on sevens: twice seven cards in each suit, three times seven Trumps (plus the numberless Fool; eleven times seven total (plus Fool). The name itself, he said, derived from the Egyptian tar, meaning "road," and ro, meaning "royal." Therefore, Tarot translated as the "Royal Road of Life."
Brother Paul shook his head invisibly and moved on. He encountered a disciple of Gebelin called Aliette, a wigmaker by profession, who decided that the origin of Tarot dated back almost four thousand years to the general time of the Deluge. He reversed his name and used it to entitle his deck, adding a modest description of its worth: the Grand Etteila. Here the Lady Pope became the Lady Consultant, a lovely nude woman standing within a whirlwind; that card also bore his name, Etteila. The Kings and Queens became professional men and social ladies, and the Fool was Folly or Madness. The deck was well illustrated and very pretty—but Brother Paul was not inclined to linger.
Next he found Alphonse Louis Constant, who under the nom de plume Eliphas Levi traced Tarot back further yet to Enoch, the Biblical son of Cain. He tied it in with the Jewish Qabalah, aligning the Trumps to correspond to paths along the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Then Brother Paul saw Gerhard Encausse, who under the name of Papus aligned the Trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. "Abraham the Jew would have loved that!" Brother Paul commented and moved on.
At last he approached the twentieth century. There was the Order of the Golden Dawn, and there was Arthur Edward Waite, designing yet another "corrected" Tarot. Waite made the Fool into a saintly figure with the dog a prancing pet instead of a seat-biting menace, and the notorious Lady Pope became a virginal High Priestess. He converted one of the Devil's imps into a full-breasted nude woman suggestive of Eve, and he dabbled generally with the symbolism like an editor blue penciling a manuscript he did not understand. And of course he failed to restore the Hermit to Time. Paul Foster Case, another Dawn member, refined the images, retaining all Waite's errors for his B.O.T.A. (Builders of the Adytum) deck, and Brother Paul's own Holy Order of Vision further refined the Case variant for its private Tarot.
But Brother Paul now discovered he could no longer accept the Vision Tarot. It had only partial relation to the truth as he now saw it. "Oh, Satan—you have divested me of something I valued," he said. "I was satisfied with the Vision Tarot, believing it to be the most refined and authentic deck available—until I went to Hell."
Nevertheless, he moved on. Aleister Crowley was another Dawn member who had to dabble. He converted Fortitude to Lust with the nude woman voluptuously bestriding the multi-headed beast, one of her hands resting on the animal's penis while the other supported a cup like a filling womb against a background of sperm and egg cells. His Devil most resembled a monstrous phallus with a buck goat superimposed. Justice became Adjustment, Temperance became Art, Judgment became Aeon, the Hanged Man was castrate (Brother Paul suffered a sudden shock of empathy), and the Hermit—remained the Hermit. Brother Paul threw up his invisible hands and moved on. Now he knew the theoretical identity of his Bad Companion and wasn't sure he cared to know more.
Yet the Tarot variations multiplied. One group used mediums and a ouija board to derive a "New" Tarot quite different from all prior decks. There was also a military Tarot, and an animal Tarot, and a nude-woman Tarot and a Star Maiden Cosmic Tarot and even a Devil's Tarot—
"Enough, Satan!" Brother Paul cried soundlessly. "They are all variants of the meaningless deck I foisted on the world, interpreted to destruction by idiots! Let me center on something meaningful, not this interminable proliferation! And let me interact at least a little! If this was the life of a ghost or traveling soul, it was frustrating enough to be another version of Hell. In assimilating the world's knowledge, the ghost also assimilated its follies—and could do nothing to abate them.
"So shall it be," Satan agreed. The cards flew up, exploding from their packs to fill the scene with multiple pictures like the conclusion to the story Alice in Wonderland, spinning about him with increasing rapidity until their images blurred and he was in a wash of confusion.
Help!
Was it his own cry? No, he knew he was in the power of Satan and needed no other assistance; the cry had come from elsewhere, perhaps telepathically. In his aural state he might be receptive to such a message.
Brother Paul tried to orient on the soundless plea, but he remained in chaos. Colors swirled about him, yielding no fixed forms. It was as though he floated through a waterless ocean, unbreathing, for his traveling aura had no lungs. Disembodied yet sentient, he was unable to control his whereabouts without Satan's imperative.
My soul drifts free, he thought.
But not without purpose. Someone had called for help, and Brother Paul had received that plea and was drawn by that need.
Am I dead?
It was a flashing of light, the meaning in the flow. A spirit newly freed of its mortality, a soul rising toward Nirvana or sinking toward Hell. If he could only reach it, help guide it—I am a fool! it flashed.
Brother Paul began to learn how to navigate in this chaotic state. He oriented on the flashing voice. Of course this person was a fool—the Fool of Tarot. Every person was. Brother Paul moved along a corridor that opened ahead, not a special avenue exactly but a—
The person screamed. The Fool must have stepped off the precipice! That was the nature of Fools. So noble, idealistic, well intentioned—the epitome of the finest expectations of civilization. Yet also supremely impractical. Fools tended to get bitten in the posterior by unruly canines: anal sadism to gratify the spectators. Especially when practiced on an individual of lofty aspirations.
The journey was amazingly far, though not precisely long. He moved at impossible velocity through a veil he could not quite define. At last he saw the person who had summoned him. Flashing for help, it was no human being at all, yet not a creature like Antares either. This was a hideous animate disk harrow. A savagely ringed worm with laser lenses. I need a guide! it flashed.
Brother Paul was taken aback. He had somehow anticipated a human being, not this flashing slash thing. Yet it seemed this was a creature in need. How could he refuse? "I will be your guide," he said almost before the thought was complete. Yet how could he guide when he was lost himself?
As he spoke, his setting filled in about him: the Station of the Holy Order of Vision with its important windmill turning behind him. His last conscious contact with the elements of nature and Tarot before he had been summoned to this unique quest, what seemed thousands
of years ago. It was good to feel firm ground beneath his feet again; chaos really did not appeal.
Could he simply walk back into his former life at the Station, leaving all Hell behind him now? He was tempted to try! But first he had to help this entity who was in need, if he could.
What mode of thing are you? the creature demanded, just as though it were the normal entity and he the weird monster. Well, its viewpoint was no doubt valid for it—and after what Brother Paul had learned about himself, he could well understand how monstrous he might seem to another sapience.
He suddenly realized that this was no part of his own framework, but that of the summoning creature. His setting of the Order Station was merely a bit of mocked-up background to make him seem more natural, much as a specimen in a modern zoo might be placed in a cage painted to resemble its home milieu. This was in fact—the future! He had traveled forward through time to a period far beyond his own mortal termination.
"No thing am I, though once a thing I was," Brother Paul said with a smile. He, like the Roman poet Vergil, author of the Aeneid, had been brought forward in time to assist one who knew of him. No wonder he had been so conscious of the Triumph of Time in the Tarot! "I lived on Planet Earth, circa 2000, in the time of the Fool emigration program that depleted our planet." He explained his origin in more detail, knowing it would be difficult for this entity to credit.
Sibling Paul of Tarot! the creature interrupted him. The Patriarch of the Temple!
Well, these confusions had to be expected. "No, I am merely Brother Paul, a humble human creature. No patriarch, no temple—the Holy Order of Vision is not that type. But I will help you all I can since you seem to be in need and have called, and I have heard, and this is my purpose in life—and it seems in death also. But I shall be able to help you better once I am oriented. Of what species, region, and time are you that you thus invoke me?"