The Man cards in the William Blake Tarot, my personal favorite btw, are focused and goal-oriented. Working from the mind, they represent rational power, artistic mastery, and control over the powers of the suits. They define and assert, and demand recognition for their expertise.
Seeking action and wanting to transform things (“the male is a furnace of beryll”), they can also be inflexible and intolerant of others. They are self-defining and self-oriented.
The Man cards roughly correspond to the King cards in the traditional Tarot, but with greatly extended powers of creativity and spirituality as they rather epitomize the individual. Like in the Rider Waite Smith , Golden Dawn and Crowley Harris Thoth Tarots, the Man cards are also associated with the suit of fire because they are forceful, passionate, and dangerous.
One power alone makes a poet – Imagination the divine vision.
William Blake
The Creative Process Suit of Music represents the emotional uses of divine imagination. It corresponds to the Suit of Cups in conventional Tarot. Its symbol is the lyre, an ancient stringed instrument whose name means ‘to laud in song’.
The earliest lyres were made by stringing animal horns, and its seven strings were the basis of todays’s musical scale. The lyre was sacred to Orpheus, Greek god of music, and was honored in the stars as the constellation Lyra. Luvah, the Zoa of Emotions, presides over this suit, whose element is Fire.
Music is associated with passion, the sense of smell, and abstract precision such as in musical theory and mathematics. The cards in this suit portray situations and states of being that pertain to human feelings, especially love, as related to the power of imagination. (from the book by Ed Buryn)
This card is from the title design to Gray’s poem, “The Bard,” but could illustrate Blake’s own lines from his Songs of Experience:
Hear the voice of the bard!
Who present, past, & future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The holy word,
That walk’d among the ancient trees.
Bards were minstrels who acted as heralds, and sang heroic odes at celebrations and festivals. The Man of Music is such a bard, a wise counselor and gifted visionary. His hoary beard and advanced age signify his emotional control and vast experience. A good term for him is wizard (‘wise one’), a member of the magical establishment.
He stands next to the sea of time & space (or the material world) beneath the branches of the “ancient trees” where walked the “holy word” – the murmurings of the trees and so he mediates between the worlds of matter and spirit and is a shaman who sings sagas of the soul.
His mystical authority is asserted by his starry magician’s robe. Crowning his golden harp, is an angelic muse, which itself holds another, miniature harp representing the eternal & esoteric maxim, As Above, So Below. But it is the bard’s imagination that roams freely between the two worlds, never truly part of either, but soaring and seeing that which is and that which is about to be.
Blake’s window quotation states that imagination is ageless, and so this is the part of yourself or another who is a spokesperson for the soul, interpreting the pregnant sounds and deep currents of life.
When you reach this card, you are seeing your need to match maturity of emotion with a real concern for others. While you are wonderfully imaginative but need an audience to appreciate you for no one wants to tell a tale to the winds.
The Man of Music is old-fashioned, and devoted to tradition. In the extreme, he may be an idealist out of touch with reality, or live in a fantasy world of self-delusion like Don Quixote and his extreme sensitivity to his pain, his own and others, may lead to drowning his feelings in addiction or neurosis.
In the creative process, this card represents a time or a situtation when you need to offer yourself as a servant, fully dedicating yourself to what you love, and in doing so, helping others, and creating something ageless but of its time.
KEYWORDS:
EMOTIONAL CONTROL AND SELF-DISCIPLINE • MEDIUMSHIP • SHAMANISM • WIZARDRY • WISE COUNSEL • SOULFUL EXPRESSION • CREATIvE MASTERY
or LIvING IN FANTASY • SELF-DELUSION • SELF-PITY and COWARDICE
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