Haindl Tarot - Mother of Swords in the South

Gardener

In her book The Kabbalah Tree, Rachel Pollack says that one concept of the Tree of Life is that the second and third sephirot (Wisdom and Understanding) represent the supernal (highest) mother and father, while sephirot four and five are the younger generation parents, and six (Beauty) is the divine son. In Jewish history, Sarah and Abraham are the older parents, Isaac and Rebecca the younger, and Jacob the son. I think in Greek mythology this would be Chronos and Rhea, then Zeus and Hera. Don’t know about a divine son, though.

Haindl used this concept to structure his court cards. The mother and father of each suit are the older generation parental gods, and the daughter and son the younger parental gods. This doesn’t always work, but it is exactly the concept for the Swords Suit (Egyptian pantheon), so I thought I’d start there.

These are quotes from Pollack’s book The Haindl Tarot: The Minor Arcana.

Most people know Nut (sometimes called Mother of the Nile) as the night sky, arched over the Earth, her body filled with stars. Images of Nut can be found very far back, because her legend goes back to primordial times, possibly the oldest goddes in the world. Her image arches over the earth, or she appears upright, on her toes. Haindl painted both figures onto this card. The upright image is actually the same as the arching one, as seen from the inside of a coffin, with her arched form painted on the inside lid. The coffin stands in for the world, and night becomes a symbol of death. Death covers us entirely, the way the night covers the earth. While the Mother confronts us with the fear of darkness and death, she also shelters us. Her presence in the coffin aids the soul’s passage through the chaos of death.

What happens to the sun at night? One Sun myth tells that the Mother eats the sun every evening, he travels through her body and reemrges in the morning. In this card there are three circles moving along the upright figure. Haindl choose three because the night sky is the Goddess as a totality, High Priestess and Empress combined in a single figure.
 

prk001

Mother of Swords in the South

I am at my office right now. So, I don't have the cards in my hand. I am using the online cards available at www.tarot.com. If I find some more details after looking at my cards at home then I will post them later. Even though I have the books for some time, I have not yet opened them. So what I post here are just what I observe and feel in the cards.

Mother of Swords in the South:
There are two females in the card. They look like they are doing some kind of acrobatics. The background is filled with stars on a blue sky and the foreground is hazy with some kind of yellowish smoke. There are three orange colored discs which look like chakras denoted on the body of the standing female. I can recognize the top two chakra positions but I have never seen a chakra as shown in the bottom position.
I can see that she is focussed on what she is doing. She looks like she is an earthly women who just goes about doing her task without getting distracted. I can feel peace and silence in their environment and it almost feels magical to be in such a place.


Gardener, I will read your post about this card today evening and will post any comments I have.
 

Gardener

Oh my goodness, someone actually posted a reply!!! Bless you, RK!

Actually, I feel kind of guilty because as I typed up my post, I realized that it is really complicated and esoteric. Usually I think I can do a pretty good job of explaining complicated topics well, but in this case, I think I just added confusion. Perhaps Mother of Swords wasn't the best place to start.

But we're here, right? The big question I have, if any brave souls are still reading, is what we do with a deck where the card is so very different from the Rider Waite standard. She isn't a queen, she isn't a personality archetype, she's a goddess. She is about our fear of death. I don't think I could look at this card and say, oh, this is my office manager. Or, oh, this is me when I'm feeling very intellectual.

The court cards are much more about religion than about regular people. How would you (anyone?) use them? Would you apply them to people anyway, or would you treat this as a different kind of divination exercise, perhaps geared more towards discovering which gods speak to you?
 

Bean Feasa

I had shelved this deck for a long time, thinking that, though very appealing, it would be complicated and involve a lot of work. I've the house to myself tonight and sat myself down and make some posts in the Tarot of Prague group. But then I started checking the new posts (of course!) and this thread with its powerful first post really caught my eye Gardener (I felt it was sort of opening a way into the deck for me, thank you for that). So I've just dusted Haindl off, and though I'm not sure whether I could commit at the moment to a regular study group, I hope you won't mind if I post what might probably be just a once-off reply (you never know though ;))

It's a really intriguing card, isn't it? I love the 'night arching over earth' concept. It's a bit scary, but then the Queen of Swords is a scary character in other decks too. The way the stars are portrayed is interesting - they seem to me to form a mesh, perhaps even a wire fence. Not sure if that springs to mind because I read the other thread on starting a study group and someone mentioned that Haindl himself had been in a concentration camp. This does seem to me to be a card of survivors, of people who have endured and come through, people who have had to make the best of a difficult space.
There's something yoga-like (or acrobatic, as prk has mentioned) about the poses of the two figures. Hinting at a necessary flexibility, adaptability maybe. The red circles make me think of the notion of 'processing' something - dealing with matters of burning importance perhaps.
It's a dark card in one way, but it has a sort of backlighting too, and I like the serene expression on the face of the upright (or prone??) figure. Seems to say - 'Been there, a dark place. But what're you gonna do? I learned a lot.'
 

Alta

What an interesting series of posts!
The Goddess Nut as the Queen of Swords, taken from the standpoint of 'conventional' Queen of Swords meanings/energies is a worthwhile thought.
As a Queen, no doubt. As a ruler of Air, also a perfect fit, after all she holds/is/embodies the very sky.
The Queen of Swords is not exactly one of the more 'human' queens, she is generally depicted as remote, far-seeing, exacting. That works well for Nut. She may be a mother, in the true mythic sense, but I tend to notice that severed head she is holding (in many Queen of Swords depictions). I see that Rachel Pollock is somewhat kinder in her depiction.
Protection, sources of strength and knowingness arre not necessarily kind, they can be very impersonal.
 

Imagemaker

This is a strangely mystical card for me. The vertical figure looks like she is doing the mountain pose of yoga, solidly planted feet, upreaching arms, composed and sturdy.

The other figure is out of proportion--doing a version of a yoga pose perhaps, but her arms are way too long compared to her legs. This is no human.

The stars do indeed look like a chain-link fence to me, and the orange circles make no sense at all. They capture the vertical line of the mountain pose, but otherwise they have no meaning for me.

I like the cloudy background, as though the figures are emerging from the mist in a vision.
 

prk001

Marion said:
She may be a mother, in the true mythic sense, but I tend to notice that severed head she is holding (in many Queen of Swords depictions). I see that Rachel Pollock is somewhat kinder in her depiction.
Protection, sources of strength and knowingness arre not necessarily kind, they can be very impersonal.
Your description of Nut comes closer to the Indian Goddess Kali. Personally, I have not yet noticed any Mother of Swords card as you described. Thats probably because I just stick with only a few decks. :)
Kali is always shown holding a severed head on one hand and blood dripping from her mouth.
Also, She wears a chain of skulls. Nevertheless she is a protector and a great source of strength as you said about Nut.
Your last line aptly describes the personality of Kali too.
 

prk001

Imagemaker said:
The other figure is out of proportion--doing a version of a yoga pose perhaps, but her arms are way too long compared to her legs. This is no human.
Thats what I noticed about this other person too. I thought the artist extended her hands a little too much just to keep her back balanced and perfectly horizontal to the ground. Just looking at those hands for same times made me creepy though. I just had to laugh at myself for that. ;)
 

Imagemaker

Kali is always shown holding a severed head on one hand and blood dripping from her mouth.

I don't have time to look up the precise story now, but Kali was imposing peace with her actions (as I recall the story). By cutting off the head of (?) and not letting his blood touch the ground, she stopped a war from continuing. Each drop of blood that hit the ground would have leapt up as an enemy warrior.

Will look the story up tomorrow!
 

RedMaple

Mother Night

This does not seem a scary card to me. The net of stars is beautiful, and seeing the night sky as mother is comforting. I like the image of the circles, which I see as the sun moving through the body of the mother sky at night, but also as the soul, moving through the darkness between lives into another incarnation. To think of death in the way we think of night is a comfort. This mother is holding up the sky, covering us in death. It is a very protective image to me.

In a reading, I would wonder about what issues the querent is facing in regards to sleep or death. Is there illness, an aging parent? Are there nightmares or insomnia? How can the night be seen as protective rather than threatening?

Using the Goddess in this card seems to increase the potency of the card, almost upgrading the energy from a court to an archetypal Major, for me. It feels very potent. I think about how we, or others in our lives, re-enact myths, embody archetypal or divine forces.

RedMaple