A few words about the Aeon trump in the Haindl tarot. It has been of tremendous significance to me over the years in the genesis of my work in progress Avalonian Aeon (from which the following is extracted)and calls strongly to me again at the start of this new decade.
To me, the Aeon trump had always been the most interesting Haindl card. The imagery combines aspects of Crowley’s ideas with the traditional Judgement. Two rivers wind across a wasteland. One contains blue water, the other, red liquid fire. They lead the eye towards a landmark at a central far horizon. Glastonbury Tor. Above it looms a stormy sky, full of clouds and strange suggestive shapes. It carries a Book of Revelation vibe. A clearly visible eye, stated by Haindl to be of a Goddess, looks out through the miasma. Droplets of blue rain descend. Individual tongues of red fire ascend. At the middle of the image, as the obvious focus, can be seen a large transparent egg of blue. Within it, lies an upside-down foetus, finger to its mouth in the gesture of Harpocrates. The stirring archetypal motif was consciously taken from the final moments of Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey. In that seminal movie, the image of a foetus floating in outer space above the Earth, had deeply stirred many in a way that defied rational analysis. It spoke of a mythological truth. In Haindl’s Tarot card, the babe of the New Aeon descends from the Goddess to be born at Glastonbury. In the amazing mix of old and new Aeon imagery are suggestions of both the disease and it’s cure. We are locked into a destructive myth cycle of the end days. Revelation and Nostradamus dominate the western collective unconscious. Ways must be found to dissolve such self-fulfilling prophetic scripts. The Goddess and the Tor, the Aeon babe, and the birth of a new humanity represent possible paths across the abyss.
