A Tarot Spread drawn from Emerson’s Nature
Below you will find an excerpt from my forthcoming project, the American Renaissance Tarot. It’s an eight-card, all-purpose Tarot spread for meditating on your current life situation. But if you’d like to find out a little bit more about Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), the man, and why he became so popular with nineteenth-century Americans, continue reading after the Tarot instructions.
Nature
An all-purpose spread for identifying your goals and feelings
This Tarot spread was inspired by the eight chapters in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal book, Nature. The number eight puts us in mind of the lemniscate, or infinity symbol, which traditionally appears on the Magician card. We’ve replaced the lemniscate, however, with the “transparent eyeball” that Emerson becomes in Nature, because it carries much the same meaning: a simultaneous awareness of earthly existence and the mystery that activates it. As the infinity symbol suggests the endless transformation of a state into its opposite and then back again, so Emerson in Nature follows the Ideal into the realm of material life and out again. Use this Tarot spread to reflect on both the finite realities of your situation and the timeless truths that underlie these material appearances.
Card 1: Nature, the nature of the situation or dilemma you’re facing, your personal nature. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”
Card 2: Commodity, tools, resources, gifts, strengths, anything you can use to address or ameliorate the situation at hand. “Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but also the process and the result.”
Card 3: Beauty, aesthetics, perspective shift, something de-valued or overlooked, something that needs redemption and reclaiming. “There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful.”
Card 4: Language, writing, speaking, self-talk, tone, signs, symbols, correspondences, word choice. “The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”
Card 5: Discipline, the work ahead of you, the method to be applied, the ideal attitude to adopt, natural laws. “The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every event.”
Card 6: Idealism, projected outcomes, your dreams, hopes, wishes, and fears. “The advantage of the ideal theory … [is] that it presents the world in precisely the view which is most desirable to the mind.”
Card 7: Spirit, the truth, the real, the likely outcome, the integration of conscious and subconscious desires. “Man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite.”
Card 8: Prospects, the future, where everything is headed, overarching theme, transcendental truth, spiritual wisdom. “A guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson in his times
Ralph Waldo Emerson was something like the first New Age guru for a society that was just breaking free of the constraints of puritanical religion. Romanticism came late to America, and when it arrived, it was filtered through the “Transcendentalist” discourse of Emerson and other New England literati. This five-syllable term is intimidating, and the six-syllable Transcendentalism is even worse. Dip your toe into the movement’s genesis, and you will read that the transcendental forms of German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, were the inspiration for Emerson’s Transcendental Club.
In graduate school, I was convinced that this dreadfully boring and verbose take on Transcendentalism was a plot to cut down on the freaky occult weirdness that actually defined the movement. I dropped out of my prestigious PhD program after performing miserably in an Emerson seminar, convinced that the pious scholarly regard for Emerson was fueled by pure hype. It’s almost twenty years later, and I haven’t substantively changed my opinion. So to say that I was slow to appreciate Emerson would be an understatement.
For context, it’s helpful to know that the United States suffered from an inferiority complex in the early years of its nationhood, and that critics were sort of casting around for the fateful American they could elect as a homegrown Goethe. The Harvard-educated, erudite yet soulful Emerson fit the bill. Emerson was at one point a Unitarian minister, but his iconic break with the church came to articulate the religious convulsions of the nineteenth century in general. The sin-obsessed Calvinists (Puritans) were rejected en masse in favor of kinder forms of Christianity like Evangelicalism. All of a sudden, it seemed reasonable for religion to make room for — well, reason, which is to say, science. Mid-nineteenth century America would also be turned upside down by a craze for talking to the dead in an informal, women-dominated religious movement known as Spiritualism. Emerson’s post-religious, humanistic musings fit like an umbrella over this ferment of new beliefs and revolutionary philosophies. While no one could pin Emerson to a single religious outlook during his lifetime, it’s clear now that what Emerson offered to his audience of seekers was an incipient form of New Age belief.
The term “New Age” tends to be quite polarizing, and so I might easily scrap it and substitute “New Thought” instead; New Thought was a movement that bloomed late in the nineteenth century and was inspired by (guess who) Emerson. It’s well-known that the New Age hit, The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, was a mash-up of vintage New Thought ideas, and so here we have come full circle: Emerson inspired New Thought which ultimately inspired the New Age. The common thread we can draw through these several movements is the idea of mental magic. Change your thoughts, change your life — and though we might want to rail against the simplicity of this premise and list off its limitations, most of us know that, on a fundamental level, it works.
I won’t provide an overview of Emerson’s entire career here, but I will give you a way of understanding his Transcendentalist classic, Nature (1836). If Transcendentalism has a Bible, Nature is it. Fortunately you can read it in about an hour, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll understand what Emerson’s talking about. My many experiences reading Nature in a classroom setting left me with the impression that my professors were yoking Big Philosophical Ideas to Emerson’s little book, when it isn’t at all clear that Emerson is trying to show off his erudition here. Rather, Emerson is speaking right to you, soul to soul, and imploring you to perceive an alternate reality. When you enter into this transcendent mental space, far above the common lot, you become imbued with the powers of a god.
Nature isn’t really about the natural world at all. Rather, it is about the mental structures that allow you to perceive the world outside of yourself, which is why Transcendentalism has been linked to Kant. But beyond a little Kantian flavor, Transcendentalism on the whole partakes much more of Platonic Idealism than Kantian Idealism. The reason this matters is that Kant never inspired a religion that I know of. Plato’s writings, on the other hand, gave birth to the trippy NeoPlatonists who are behind most of the Western religions we label “esoteric” today. The idea that an unseen or Ideal world undergirds the seen one is pure NeoPlatonism, and a lot easier to grasp than German Enlightenment philosophy.
All of this is a long way of saying that the philosopher Emerson is a hard sell, because we have to fill in rigid credos where he doesn’t write them, and skip over his many lapses in argument. This should be our clue that Emerson the preacher overrides Emerson the thinker. He writes for the effect of galvanizing changes in your consciousness, not for philosophical precision. To quote the man himself: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Emerson writes heartbreakingly elegant sentences by the dozen which, when taken together, often contradict one another. After hanging out in the lofty Ideal realm in Nature, Emerson retreats back to Earth with an apology, writing, “I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother,” and reassures us that he also expands in the sun like corn and melons. Emerson can’t even fully commit to Idealism in the chapter in Nature entitled “Idealism.”
But rather than frustrating us, Emerson’s philosophical flirting, his toying with Big Ideas but never going deep, should prompt us to read him in a different way. He is a secular sage, the nineteenth-century’s answer to a New Age guru, and Nature belongs in the Self-Help genre. I encourage you to read Emerson the way you might read Eckhart Toll or some other modern mystic. When we take Emerson out of the realm of the philosophers and scholars and give him back to the common folks, the magic of Transcendentalism is restored. The American Renaissance Tarot is due out in August, 2021.
