The Body as Oracle

Somatic Wisdom and how to cultivate it.

By Hiba Schahbaz. Artist’s Website and Instagram Account.

(If you missed it the chat, we now have a shared Spotify playlist where all of you who are interested, can add music that moves you and that you enjoy. It is imagined as the collection of music that moves the “juices” of the collective feminine. Check it here. Our chat is here).

In Tarot of Marseille, the often feared card Tower is called La Maison Dieu meaning “The House of God.” The imagery of the card is not aggressively destructive — the Tower is open at the Crown/Top, but it remains intact. The figures beneath it are acrobats in the circus, touching the soil as the green gates with the crescent Moon open to pour the abundant, vital energy outwardly. Everything is exploding and pouring and there is vegetation and growth all around.

La Maison Dieu symbolises the process in which the problem and pure energy transform and become wisdom and life. With its colours, the card tells that the Body/House is the active (red) container (blue) of the Divine Spirit and that it is the Divine Spirit’s active (red) realisation (green). This is the process of obtaining a teaching and digesting/destroying it within the body. By allowing it to be dissolved, it can fertilise the Body and support it as it rises as the House of God. The conceptual mind disappears and what remains are the Pure Body and the Pure Light in communion. Instead of being “aware” of God, God is experienced without any mental commentary, categorisation or rationalisation. God instead of being dissected and only known in ‘parts’, is experienced as a whole:

How we conceptualise or what we believe is not the focus here, however the symbolic representations can help us understand what we are experiencing in the world and within ourselves. This particular understanding of the Body is relevant to today’s article which shall focus on Somatic Wisdom.

In the card the two acrobats move in the opposite directions. And yet, they come out of the same Body (House). The feminine principle, before anything else seeks to relate and connect the oppositions. It naturally gravitates towards Unity, which in its shadow aspect, can manifest as a desire to remove any differentiation. This is the Negative Mother who needs everything to be “the same” or “flattened” as she desires control. However, in its harmonious aspect, this transforms into ability to appreciate and allow differentiation. It also allows it to understand the undercurrent, shared reality (House) which hold the differences in space. Instead of breaking things down into parts, the feminine principle binds and connects. This is also why the card Star (L’étoile) comes right after the House of God (La Maison Dieu).

The connecting principle is fundamentally embodied as it is the body that connects and receives. Mind is the one that seeks to dissect, categorise and understand. That does not mean that the mind is unnecessary but that our mind should give image, words and language to the embodied experience — the mind should not control and manipulate the body. Instead of trying to figure it out through dissecting, the mind should seek to understand it through relating.

Imbalances in the feminine psyche will always manifest in the body—eating disorders, the need to be “small”, to make your body less “female” in a dimorphic sense due to negative or vampiric reactions that the female form stirs in others—these are all symptoms of struggling to relate to, and understand the body.