Aqua Profonda: Water and the Tarot of the Drowning World

This is the text of a presentation I did on Kahn and Selesnick's Tarot of the Drowning World, which was hosted by Morbid Anatomy on the 10 September 2023. For the complete PowerPoint with all images, see my academia page.

I’m very excited to be able to talk about the Tarot of the Drowning World. Of all the tarot decks on the market today that I am aware of, it is only the Tarot of the Drowning World and the Carnival at the End of the World tarot decks that I feel motivated to make the effort to learn, and this is because of (along with the excellent artwork) their contemporary relevance. These two decks are, let’s say, “up to date” with what is happening in the – or on the – world today.

While I appreciate many other decks, based on their theory or their art or both: (1) I simply don’t have time to master them all and; (2) the Kahn, Selesnick, and Falkner tarot decks are directly relevant to the environment – which should be a topic of major concern and interest to all humans and certainly is to me.

Today I want to focus on the presence and associations of Water in the Tarot of the Drowning World.

While thinking of a title for this presentation I remembered the term “Aqua Profonda”. This is a rather famous term in inner city Melbourne, Australia, where I live as it refers to a sign painted on a wall at the Fitzroy Pool, which is located just up the road, here, from me. The pool opened in 1908, but the sign was painted around 1953 or 54 at the initiative of the pool manager, James Murphy, because he found that he kept having to rescue Italian migrant children from the deep end of the pool. He asked an Italian friend what the words for “deep water” were in Italian and had them painted at the deep end of the pool.

“Aqua” here is actually misspelled; in Italian it has a “c” in it – as it is here, it’s the Latin. That reminds me of the Italian Acqua Alta, which in Latin is “deep water”, but in Italian is “high water”, evoking the Acqua Alta high water in Venice. Acqua Alta the name for the high tides that flood part of Venice (and some other places around the northern Adriatic) between autumn and spring, caused by a combination of the moon’s pull on the water and two winds, the sirocco and the bora, also Venice is sinking, very slowly, but I digress.

The Aqua Profonda sign is a big deal in Melbourne and it even has heritage listing so it can’t be destroyed. In addition to its association with the post-war migration program; it appeared in the 1982 film Monkey Grip – which is based on a 1977 novel by Australian writer Helen Garner, about living in share housing and experimental approaches to relationships in Fitzroy, which back then was considered a slum, although now it is extremely desirable and expensive. In the film Aqua Profonda serves as a metaphor for the tempestuous relationship of the main protagonists; and lastly, Aqua Profonda was the slogan of the Save Our Pool campaign in the mid 1990s when the council was considering closing the pool.

So, Aqua Profonda means Deep Water, but to me it also evokes, Profound Water – which seems pertinent to the Tarot of the Drowning World deck, because isn’t that what we want to access – or to be – as diviners? Profound!

Synonyms for “profound” include words like deep, thoughtful, reflective, philosophical, weighty and insightful. The dictionary definition includes: very great or intense; penetrating or entering deeply into subjects of thought or knowledge; and having deep insight or understanding. This is what the visual aspect of the Tarot of the Drowning World – with its water – evokes for me: this inundation, this potentially deep water, on top of which float human figures, objects, animals, plants, and all sorts of flotsam. Maybe they are arising from, or are buoyed up by, this Aqua Profonda. Maybe this Aqua Profonda is our deep dark subconscious mind from which float up images and insights…

Aiming for or claiming profundity can seem hubristic – but it’s surely no bolder than claiming the power or skill of divination itself.   

While I am very enthusiastic about the Tarot of the Drowning World, I have not yet mastered it to a sufficient degree to use in a professional setting. My tarot deck of choice since 1984 has been the Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris-designed Thoth deck – and I didn’t use that in a professional capacity until about 10 years after originally learning it.

As a Thelemite with a background in western ceremonial magick the theory behind this deck makes sense to me and I find the images very informative. This is the deck I use in both my personal and my professional tarot reading. I have many other tarot decks and a couple of oracle decks, but I always use the Thoth deck for professional reading and any serious reading I do for myself. I just find it the clearest and most informative deck to use. So, I’d have to have a good reason to consider making the effort to learn, and form a relationship with, another deck.

I have had two stints as a professional tarot reader; once for a period of time in the early 1990s at a shop called Mythical Moon and more recently since 2019 at a shop called Muses of Mystery, both located in Melbourne. It wasn’t until this second time around working as a tarot reader that I noticed that the cards of the Thoth deck did not cover some of the types of concerns relevant to humans today. Two obvious examples of this lack of contemporary coverage are that it is very gender binary and it does not address or incorporate the environmental crisis. While sure, you can make it cover those topics – you can extend certain cards’ meanings to include those issues – but it doesn’t really. It wasn’t designed that way.

Of course the Thoth deck was designed in the early 20^th century, and is based on what I’ll generalise as the “Western Mystery Tradition”, incorporating Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythology, the Qabalistic tree of life, alchemy, astrology, and the Empedoclean Four Elements – which I love, of course!

Seeing as this presentation focuses on Water in the Tarot of the Drowning World, let’s first look at how the Thoth deck conceptualises Water, and then I’ll look at how the Tarot of the Drowning World conceives of Water, in my opinion.

The Thoth tarot deck classifies Water as one of the Four Elements or the Classical Elements, a model proposed in the mid-fifth century BCE by the Pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles of Akragas in Sicily. Empedocles conceived the basis of existence as consisting of, or deriving from, four roots: Fire, Water, Air and Earth, moved by two opposing forces, Love and Strife. The model of the Four Elements was transmitted through the centuries, and found its way into the proto-tarot back when it was a game in 16^th century Florence.[1]

In the late nineteenth century the Four Elements system was an important component in the theory informing the magical rituals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the magical society Crowley was initiated into and which paved the way for the popularity of occultism today. The Four Elements consequently feature in Crowley’s Thoth (and many other subsequent) tarot decks. What is important to note in regard to this is that in the Thoth tarot the Four Elements are symbolic.  

As Crowley explains “One must constantly remember that the terms used by ancient and medieval philosophers do not mean at all what they mean nowadays. ‘Water’ does not mean to them the chemical compound H2O; it is an intensely abstract idea, and exists everywhere...The word ‘element’ does not mean a chemical element; it means a set of ideas; it summarises certain qualities or properties.”

In popular occultism water is characterised as passive, feminine, and emotional. In the Thoth deck “water” represents aspects of water such as (and I quote Crowly here) the “swift passionate attack of rain and springs… water’s power of solution…brilliance… its power of reception and reflection… purity and beauty… dreaminess, illusion and tranquility… transmission, refraction, distortion…elasticity, volatility, hydrostatic equilibrium… the catalytic faculty and the energy of steam… transmutation, stagnancy and putrefaction… and crystallisation.” Water is attributed to the Zodiac signs Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, the suit of Cups, to the Queens in the Court Cards, and also to one of the Major Arcana, the Hanged Man, through the attribution to it of the Hebrew letter Mem, which means water. Crowley explains that “It would perhaps be better to say that it [in this card] represents the spiritual function of Water in the economy of initiation; it is a baptism which is also a death.” Again, here despites its many forms, Water is symbolic.

The Thoth tarot deck derives from the ceremonial magic classification system, devised back when we thought we humans could impose order on the visible and invisible worlds… before things started going out of control.

So how is the Tarot of the Drowning World different? What does it mean when the whole deck is “attributed” to water?

The Tarot of the Drowning World goes beyond the orderly control imposed on nature by the model of the Four Elements. It has re-tooled the tarot to meet up with the on-going transformations of our world and is based in physical reality. While the images may evoke the deep well of the unconscious, of profound water, profound wisdom, they also suggest a natural disaster. Almost all the trumps call to mind Millais’ drowned Ophelia – and is that us? Insane, suicidal? Or drowned in a tsunami, with our homes flooded by the sea because the ice caps are melting? Yes, according to Sarah Faulkner’s explanation of the deck. Water in the Tarot of the Drowning World seeps, wells up, or rushes in, overwhelming the world; apocalyptic water destroys, and washes away, not in a fiery Aeon of Horus, but drowning us, approaching inexorably while we had our backs tuned.

This is a tarot of the overwhelming of the psyche, of submersion in emotion and sensation, but it is in this devastating realisation of drowning that the mercurial spark ignites and urges us not to give in and sink, but to swim to the surface. We’re not dead yet. Grab onto something and kick your legs until you reach an island, or shore. The Tarot of the Drowning World points to a real, physical, climate emergency – one which we are in – but it says “don’t give up.” What is washed away makes room for regeneration.

Sarah asks, “Is the Drowned World a new world being born, arising out of a dark abyss or cosmic ocean? Yes…. Submerged and Resurgent.” Panic and victimhood turn into ingenuity and determination. Use an apocalypse to receive apokálypsis (or revelation). Stare into the cards and allow it to arise. Create the future.

So, like the Thoth and all good tarot decks, the Tarot of the Drowning World is more than just a divinatory system. It is a story, a world, a lesson, a source of knowledge, and of solutions. It is both literal and symbolic, both a vision of impending death and destruction, and of creation and regeneration. Most importantly, it situates humans within the world, on a horizontal plane in relationship with literal water – with rising seas, inundation of islands, flooding, sinking, drowning, tears, fluids, lakes, rivers, rain, puddles, and drinks – and encourages us to see renewal within devastation and to actively envision the future.

 

 

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[1] Minchiate