Column: Thresh-holds, Tarot, Soul
By Charles Jeanes
Introduction: a liminal period of history
Back in 2022, I wrote four chapters of connected Arcs (#182 to 185) on the subject of Our Liminal Time. One must understand what liminal means. Here is a good recent short essay on this word. https://www.verywellmind.com/the-impact-of-liminal-space-on-your-mental-health-5204371 I am returning to the subject now.
The Tarot card for this thresh-hold concept is The Hanged Man. For this present column, the cards are The Wheel of Fortune, The World, and Judgment (also called “Aeon”). I append images of those cards below and I recommend a quick look at them before the reader proceeds.
I spell “thresh-hold” this way (after this I will revert to the orthodox spelling) to make a point: we are caught between the threshing, which feels like chaos, and the holding, as we strive for sanity and stability. A concept from biology useful to historians, for this time, is “punctuated equilibrium” – meaning that human events have periods of relative calm and slow change, punctuated by rapid or violent disturbances of what had been a less-eventful epoch.
It seems to me obvious that thresholds are being crossed – or violated, depending on one’s feelings about the changes – within a lot of human experiences just now: War and Peace, mental health, social chaos, profoundly-transformative technologies, painful collapse of old certainties, the multi-crisis of our planet imperiling our species and many other life-forms.
The Wheel of Fortune and The World
The point of the first image is that no one, and no entire human civilization, experiences stasis and stable peace on a plateau of good fortune. As the Sinatra song lyric puts it, “you’re riding high in April, shot down in May.” It is Maytime for us. The West believed that in its Enlightenment period, it possessed a place it would retain, a dominant role over the world for its rational, progressive understanding of what is real. Nice try, Western Enlightenment humans! Accept it: our time of being top of the wheel is over. The 20th century was our moment of slide, downward from the peaceful 19th century plateau.
The punctuation is here. Chaotic change. Things feel bad because of that. The USA copies Russia and launches a war on Iran, rather than restraining Russia and building the old post-WWII equilibrium back into place.
No other “top civilization” is world leader, either. China might become an alternative pole for world order but has not yet achieved that place on top of the Wheel.
The World feels shaky. I know no one, I encounter no voices, anywhere, saying otherwise. The prospect feels differently for each person looking at it.
https://carriemallon.com/blog/the-world-wild-unknown-tarot/
Charles Eisenstein is the eternal optimist. https://charleseisenstein.org/sanity-project/ Science is ambiguous on the topic of our future. https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/when-will-world-end
Climate change, undeniably, demands responses. The obvious lack of consensus that the climate requires humans-as-a-whole to behave in new ways – yes, we must — is challenging. “Ignorance is bliss…”
A.I. is flagged by many as the agency that will demote humans to second-class life. A.I. is the tool that makes itself, — and humans useless.
https://bigthinkmedia.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-intelligence-outgrows
Yuval Harari thinks historically about the question; it is why I read him. He makes the right points here about the inability for humans to learn from history when we consider A. I. threats to us.
Judgement
The Tarot card for Judgement illustrates a Christian story, the raising of the dead at the End of Time. The Book of the Revelation of St. John — also called the Apocalypse — depicts how the world will end; there is a case to be made that the Christians of St. Paul’s circle quite seriously expected the end in their own time.
My readers are not likely to be inclined toward a Christian, final-book-of-the-Bible sorts of perspective, in my estimation. There are still such Christians around, but biblical literalism is not what one would call in the mainstream of opinion now. And neither is Tarot, for certain. I do not write for some kind of “ordinary” reader, some imagined average, middle-of-the-road, hypothesized majority human demographic.
[ An interpretation of this Tarot card can be found here. If esoteric traditions irritate you, do not look at the card-reader’s counsel. https://www.tetragrammaton.com/article/themoon-8g469-zhle7 ]
I offer this observation about esoteric wisdom traditions. Science, religion, the arts, philosophy: all are mental paths from this threshold place we find ourselves, in my opinion, and to ignore thousands of years of esoteric thought across many cultures seems to me to throw away mental tools for no reason other than bias. The prejudice of science against religion and esoterica is unjustifiable. Attacking non-scientific modes of knowing, labelling them false, impossible, or unintelligent, is to claim a sphere for science beyond its power. https://www.eurasiareview.com/12082023-scientific-astrology-oped/
Knowledge
Outside its sphere, the scientific method owns no monopoly on human understanding. To claim ultimate authority over all knowledge is the error of scientism. One makes a “category error” in asserting science is the only knowledge. https://www.answers-in-reason.com/shortpost/what-is-a-category-error/
Today, non-religious minds also have a great apprehension of our terminus. Has the “best-before date” for homo sapiens arrived? Here is a worthwhile essay on the history of the idea of our end.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-humanity-discovered-its-possible-extinction-timeline/
I have not offered argument for or against the hypothesis that our species is near extinction; I have no opinion on the matter, yet. I opine, without arguing, that scientific knowledge is insufficient in this liminal threshold time for human needs and human understanding of the world we have made.
What I do insist upon is the uniqueness of our moment. A.I. is an obviously unique phenomenon in our history. But so is the “multi-critical” nature of our time, combining a large number of challenges that occur together and amplify one another as crises. Call it “the poly-crisis”. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/03/polycrisis-adam-tooze-historian-explains/
My point is this: there are too many perspectives to consider for any one mind to bring together, in one understanding, the choice one experiences now. One could do so in the past. Not in 2026. We drown in data.
The peasant in Bolivia or Chad or Bhutan might not own a cellphone or computer, but they know there is the hardware, while simultaneously their software – their minds – are not Western Enlightenment minds. Minds matter more than material, in any inquiry into meaning.
Do people with the names Musk, Bezos, Huang, Ortega [see here https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ ] impact more people than a peasant can? Assuredly so. They steer a path for many going forward from our human threshold. The quality of individual mind they think with, is also unique in history.
Each of these mighty individuals make decisions that have impacts they cannot calculate. Our species in its entirety, its history, has made possible the power of these very few “lords of humankind” — and in this moment, the Lords are unlike any that we know of from recorded history: they are lords with absolutely no cultural foundation in a concept of nobility. Lords are not noble in 2026, and that too is unprecedented, and will have consequences impossible to forecast.
https://meaningness.com/nobility
Conclusions
From a threshold, one person has no choice but to go forward. No one is free to step into the past we have left, no matter one’s fear of what is coming or love of what we are leaving behind. The present threshold is by definition not a comfort zone. Mystery, the unknown, provokes a host of different responses, no doubt, but feeling simply comfortable and at ease is a highly-improbable reaction for a human. Death is the threshold we all face individually, of course, but the historical threshold I write about here is not individual but species-wide.
Still, I will state this as a truth: a single individual facing death, and the entire species of homo sapiens facing a shadowed future, have exactly one resource for reacting to events. The resource is interior, the personhood, of each human living, being, doing. I recently wrote about the Self and personhood in the Arc and this is a sequel I had not foreseen writing, but now I understand I was leading up to this topic.
[ Two previous Arcs on the subject of Soul.
https://rosslandtelegraph.com/2014/02/27/what-soul-what-were-you-born-do-28513/
https://rosslandtelegraph.com/2026/05/13/column-who-are-you-really/ ]
Reader, stop here if the idea of “your soul” is not one you give any thought or credence to.
The very fine writer Ursula K. LeGuin left many stories, several of which concern themselves with “soul-making.” Here is an excerpt from one story: “All right now, I want an answer. All my life since I was fourteen I have been making my soul. I don’t know what else to call it, that’s what I called it then, when I was fourteen and came into the possession of my life and the knowledge of my responsibility … I would have made my soul and know what it was for. But I have made my soul and don’t know what to do with it.” https://medium.com/unpsychologymag/soulmaking-a-dialogue-on-emergence-1957fbf16f18
The threshold we find ourselves upon just now is where construction of one’s soul becomes a matter of necessity, not choice.
[Much more on U. K. LeGuin here: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog ]
“there is a crack in everything, that’s how the Light gets in…” — Leonard Cohen.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Rider-Waite-Smith_tarot_deck_(Geldard)
