VEDIC TAROT 13: CHANGES (DEATH)

YAMA: The Vedic God of Changes or Death.

VEDIC TAROT NUMBER 13: CHANGES

YAMA: The Vedic God of Changes or Death.

He is also known as Dharmaraja, the Hindu god of Justice responsible for the dispensation of payment or punishment through Karma.

Another feared card in the Tarot, that some are unwilling to explore or explain to the querent (seeker).

I chose Yama to represent this particular card, because after the fall from the Deity world, he was known as the first one to become mortal and then to die and find a way to the subtle regions and celestial abodes.  He came to the physical world to find his immortality again. He became the god asked to care for departed souls ever after, during the downward spiralling cycles of ages.  However, there are other roles that do not involve actual physical death or the leaving of the body.  One is a Yogic method of experiencing dying to life while living.  The other is using the Soul Power of the Full-Stop, the Power to Pack-Up.  This is what the reader may be able to devise by the divining of the cards around the trump of Yama.  It may well be the saving grace of someone’s life, a warning, if for example, they are addicted to a drug that may well shorten their life, or are involved in some underhand crime or dangerous occupation that could expend their life.  It is an ‘end of the road’ card that needs ‘change’.  The consciousness to change is not always easy, as it involves an awakening, an alarm bell that rings true enough for them to make that change.  Changing consciousness is a soul embracing life.

Yama is transformation and shape-shifting. He urges one to die to the old ways and re-create new ways of living.  So, there is a healing aspect to Yama.  He can put an end to recurring miseries and can be supplicated to end destructive habits and help change behaviour.  The soul becomes darkened by succumbing to overwhelming vices.  Yama also grants freedom from hunger and famine, to stop starving, but in a more implicated way so that the body is nourished rather than poisoned.  Yama is the cheerful friend and guardian of the Ancestors and their abode.  He is considered a fair judge of deeds, keeping records, and restraining souls from becoming ghosts continually suffering their pasts.

What exactly is transformation and shape-shifting? 

Mullein Caterpillar. Photo: Alan Buckingham.

In Nature we have Metamorphosis, a caterpillar that will weave itself into a silken chrysalis and then eventually emerge as a butterfly or a moth… a flying creature that once crawled across leaves and now masters the air to lay eggs and begin the cycle all over again.  The caterpillar of the mullein moth has startling yellow and black spotted colours on a green-blue background and can vomit a poison to keep away predators.  It gorges on leaves, molting as it grows.  This is the larva stage.  After the final molt, it spins itself into a very tough hardened silken shell then may rest in pupate stage underground for as long as five years, before it emerges as a rather reddish dark brown moth.  Once a female moth hatches, she flies to a hanging male on a plant and mates, producing hundreds of eggs a few days later to lay on the feeding plant that the hatching caterpillars will voraciously feed upon.

Death’s-head Hawkmoth Photo: L.Hill.

Moths are nocturnal and hide during the day.  Bats, birds, spiders and lizards will eat them at any stage so they devise all kinds of camouflage and sometimes caterpillars and moths will freeze like sticks to avoid detection.  The moths also produce sounds to escape bees and bats.  A Death’s-head Hawk-moth, for example, will make a sound like a Queen bee and fly into a hive to eat the honey, spreading its wings out so it shows the yellow and black stripes like a bee on its back.  The other bees will not touch it when they hear the sound, not detectable to human ears.

It is the world of the life-eaters and everything tries to survive and thrive.  No living thing wishes to succumb to death until they reproduce the species or transform themselves with rebirth, or shape-shifting themselves.  This is why I use the analogy of the caterpillar and the moth.  What does happen inside the pupae?  It is one of the world’s mysteries, the melting and reforming, the dissolution and creation.

DIVINATION:

Learn to take control of life and overcome obsessions, making effort to transform to a better way of living.  Be ever-ready in all situations and have farsightedness for the impact of sudden changes.  Look after health issues that may arise.  Being prepared is the way forward, even if it means packing up the bed-roll and moving to another environment or country.  The nature of reality is to liberate, and liberation in life means motion and movement, the flight from danger. Learning to die while living is looking deep into oneself and meditating to be able to remote view and use the innate instinct for survival.  It also takes radial awareness to read the environment and the changes within it that may force one to flee suddenly. Temporarily forgetting the world of matter is the same as achieving soul consciousness and learning to fly with thought to oversee any situation.  Trancing and projecting thoughts remotely is flying through the subtle regions.  Aristotle taught about four kinds of Motion and Changes;

1.    Change of position.

2.    Generation and dissolution.

3.    Alteration (Shape-shifting).

4.    Increase and Decrease.

All changes are made with imaginative intelligence, the visual images that present themselves to the mind, and the translation of the image into physical form through the challenge of creation. It takes faith, skill, and impetus, to make movement to find a safer place. Sometimes there is no room for preparation. One just has to lift the bed-roll and flee in the right direction.

SANSKRIT:

Curiously enough, Yama means ‘twin’, and Yama had a twin known as Yami.  They were inseparable.  Yama was known as the Lord of Death and Yami the Lady of Life.  Yama was the son of the sun god Surya and Sanjna.  As twins, Yama and Yami were like day and night.  Yam means binder and also self-control, one ‘bound’ in time.  The regalia of Yama is a noose and also a mace, like Varuna…Justice.  Yama’s mount is the Black Buffalo Bull.  The serpent is his friend.  He is associated with crows and pigeons.  His Danda is a thrusting sword, and he has a Bedroll, to be ever-ready to move.  He has two four-eyed dogs like Mithra (Mitra) who judges souls.  The Gateway to Hades is guarded by Cerberus, a three-headed dog.  The Jackal or Anubis in Egypt was the guide for souls crossing over.

In the Rig Veda he cares for souls even in their suffering.  He has a palace in the southern netherworld.  Like Ravanna, he rules in the Iron Age of Hell when the Vices are at their strongest and demonic war is rife, when Truth has become lost. Shiva, the First Traveller comes as the Conqueror of Death and Time, and overcomes Yama with the help of Brahma in the Diamond Age to liberate souls so they become awakened and enlightened to claim their Immortality.  The cycle begins again when the old world and its ways face destruction at the same time as the new world and new ways arise in construction.  Yama is also called to prevent miscarriages and to look after lost babies.

There is a text in the Rig Veda 10.10, that is a riveting conversation between the twins, when Yami falls in love with her twin Yama and wishes to sleep with her equal to bear children, and Yama is adamant that Yami will not become a ‘stranger’ to him in order to procreate, that they are bound to one another and that the gods have eyes to see, so it is forbidden and would disrupt their harmony. He lays down the first law about incest but encourages her to meet another to become like a tree with the entwining creeper inseparable from it, but not of the same blood.

HEBREW

Nun: Fish.

Nun rules propagating and emanating. Regeneration.  The symbol of both birth and rebirth, not just the leaving of a soul from a body but also the arrival of a soul to claim a body in the world.  The sperm is likened to the swimming of the shoals of fish. After the mother becomes pregnant, usually in the second trimester around the fourth month, the first quickening is felt by the mother, when the child first kicks out on its own.  It is thought that this is the arrival of the soul to inhabit the body that has been growing inside.  The fish represents the swimming body settling in the dark sea of the womb to begin the metamorphosis and growth.  In the Qabbalah, this is Binah: Understanding.  The pain and effort to move onto the physical plain through gestation, growth, birth or rebirth, brings about wonder and joy in the end and often the meeting of souls again, although they may not always know it.

OGHAM

Nuin: Ash.

This wood was the best wood to burn to bring heat to life for warmth and to cook upon.  The fruits of the Ash are winged keys that fly through the elements across the worlds.  The joining of the Macrocosm and Microcosm and the inner and outer realms made this tree sacred in the Irish Ogham alphabet.  Nuin is associated with far-seeing and remote viewing.  The Ashvattha tree of the Hanging Man stretches across the Cosmos from the Northern Polaris Star to the Southern Polaris Star with the world nestled between these two points that do not move their positions.  In Nordic beliefs, Yggdrasil, the tree of the Norse god Odin was a sacred tree upon which he hung upside down and discovered the secrets of the divine Runes, a sacred alphabet not unlike Ogham.  Nuin is associated with shamanic journeying, protection of souls and rebirth.

MUSIC

G-natural:  G-natural is the octave of the G-Minor scale.  Both Haydn and Mozart composed music by using the G-Minor scales.  Often the sound of a lament, it is the most popular note and scale for guitar players in what are referred to as ‘Torch’ songs, about lost love or yearning, or the remembering of past love.  In 1921, Vaughan Williams wrote a Mass in G-Minor, an English work that had never been attempted since the 16^th century.  Once heard, G-Minor songs are never forgotten.  My late husband Robin loved Mozart and liked to listen to the musical notes and any artist singing ‘Torch Songs’.  He didn’t read or write music, had no name for the notes, and said he didn’t know the difference between a quaver or a crotchet, but he could play chords by ear on any type of instrument and compose music anywhere at any time.  His singing voice had a natural tone and tremor in it that affected the spine of anyone listening to one of his emotive songs.  Ahmed Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records told Robin that he could tell whether a record was a hit or not by his back.  Robin nodded and said: “Fair enough.”

One of our Irish Wolfhounds would race from the bottom of the garden into the house to lean against Robin’s back as he played a keyboard or piano, just to hear him sing and the dog happy to have his head ruffled now and again.    In fact, we all rushed in, except maybe to leave out the ‘leaning’ bit or the need to be ‘ruffled’, not to disturb the artist.

This card, Changes, again one feared by many, and despite having the number 13 (sometimes thought of as unlucky) attached to it, is not a predictive card of ensuing Death, but it does carry a warning that ‘Changes’ must be made.  Usually, other cards attached to it or around it may even point to what those changes might be, the urgency needed to undergo them, and even when they should take place.

Dwina ***