Episode 180: The Player: On the Magician Card in the Tarot

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2024

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Magician card likely graces more front covers of books on the tarot than any of the other major arcana. In many ways, it symbolizes the tarot itself, or the individual who has mastered the art of manipulating the cards to divine their meanings. Yet, the Magician is a profoundly ambiguous figure. From one perspective, he is the Magus, piercing through the illusions of ceaseless becoming to glimpse the hidden depths of reality. From another, he is all surface without depth, a carnival huckster ready to empty your coin purse while you’re transfixed by his crystal ball. In this episode, JF and Phil continue their on-again, off-again journey through the major trumps with a discussion of the card that—deservedly or not—proudly calls itself Number One. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot Weird Studies, Episode 24 on “The Charlatan and the Magus” Weird Studies, Episode 109 and Episode 110 on The Glass Bead Game Weird Studies, Episode 179 with Lionel Snell Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneology of Morals Louis Sass, Modernism and Madness Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence Richard Wagner, Parsifal William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light Participation mystique Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth Leigh Mccloskey, Tarot Re-visioned Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes, or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdst. This is Phil.
0:53.6	This week, J.F. and I resume our intermittent series on the 22 major
0:58.2	arcana of the taro and discuss the magician card, Arcanum 1 in the tarot and Noumero Uno in the Weird
1:06.2	Studies Dramatis Personae. The magician is the very archetype of the kind of intellectual that J.F. and I have
1:13.7	been theorizing on this show for almost seven years. The magician is a smoker and a joker,
1:20.0	but he's also serious as a heart attack. He's a bit of a rogue and not always the most reliable
1:25.3	of friends. Invite him in your home for the weekend and he'll
1:28.5	camp out on your sofa for a month, drinking your scotch, stealing your weed, and borrowing books
1:34.9	he has no intention of ever returning. But despite this, or maybe because of it, he brings
1:41.1	insight not easily found among the more earthbound of his scholarly brethren,
1:46.4	a forked streak of lightning in the mind. In this episode, J.F. and I consider the magician chapter
1:53.4	of Meditations on the Tarot, a masterpiece of esoteric philosophy by someone who wished to remain
1:59.5	anonymous and addressed his readers as his
2:02.3	unknown friend. As his name is now widely known, we like to call him our known friend. Anyway,
2:10.1	our known friend suggests that the magician is the figure of the hermetacist, by which he means
2:16.0	someone who possesses and maintains, quote,
2:18.6	the communal soul of religion, science, and art. The hermetacist makes a play of the various
2:24.7	departments of human life and finds the correspondences and resonances between their products.
2:31.0	Just as one of the players in Herman Hesse's glass bead game might abstract the form of a constellation
	...

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