Third Stone from the Sun, the Magician, and the Fool’s journey.
We must all start out exactly where we are, right-here, and way back then. Like any story waiting to be told, we venture out one way or another on this journey into a land unknown. Every human life begins here, on the third stone from the sun. A small rock orbiting an ordinary star, yet this is the place where each of us arrives without instruction. No map, no understanding of what the journey ahead might require of us. We must all author our own tale. We must all find our own way through. In all circumstances however, we arrive here as a fool, and that is to say, we must start out with a beginner’s mind. We must all start out from point zero. From this tiny vantage point, we begin the Fool’s journey. We step out into the world naked, without knowing what this story will ask of us. From this point, we must develop a way to navigate this world, an ego, a persona, or an identity, if you will. And with this, we must first become limited by our own circumstances. This is a necessary condition of being human.
Consensus amongst modern scientific research challenges the assertion that humans are born a tabula rasa (blank slate). What may be more accurate to say is humans possess a brain wired to learn which is genetically predisposed to traits and abilities, perhaps even more. However, these are then subsequently shaped by environment. And here the dice roles. Here potentiality meets restriction, although not necessarily quite so permanently. It’s reasonable to say, however, that most people would not deny the relational slings and arrows of childhood can leave a lasting impression. What then do we do with that? Does that become our story? Individually, we may not be to blame for much of what happened to us during the course of our lives. We do, however, each become responsible for that which we subsequently carry along the way. This can be no small task. This can shape the story that we tell. Some luggage is heavy.
As a psychotherapist I witness many new starts and hear many life stories. I see the weight of the baggage people carry bringing them to a standstill. I also see the joy and relief of setting that same weight down. Each client is unique, as is each story. Starting over invites us to start again, right where we are, and that place doesn’t change. It’s still right here. Still the third stone from the sun. It seems we become again a fool, over and over along the way. Life returning us to a beginners mind time and time again. Eventually perhaps, we learn to travel light enough that momentum becomes more constant. The story we tell becomes more our own, stripped back from that which we’ve inherited. Only carrying what might serve us well. Here the fool travels light, a single pack, for he’s learning the way of the Sun. This requires only that he fears not the heat of his own fire. As he travels more deeply into his story, he recasts his tale. This is the light the darkness reveals.
Despite what can often seem to be a lonely and solitude journey, it seems human beings do not like to travel entirely alone. Every society provides its own myths and fables, which, like a compass, help its members to understand themselves and find their place in the world more fully. These collective and shared narratives help us to engender belonging, offering a container into which experience can be held and understood. Culture does more than offer meaning. It helps shape what feels natural, what seems possible, and even what can be thought. When those structures begin to give way, it is not only meaning that is disturbed, but one’s sense of orientation within a wider context. Yet these frameworks do not contain and hold everyone equally as well. For many equally valid reasons, whether that be familial, cultural or institutional, these frameworks often fail to provide enough meaning and safety for some. What then happens to these people? In some circumstances people are often drawn to the edges. To places where the stories can provide a different rhythm, to communities that provide shelter through the alternative narratives that exist there. Subcultures thrive and frequently emerge in these places. Especially amongst the disenfranchised, the curious, the hungry of soul, and all those who carry the absence of belonging. Perhaps here meaning can be more or less re-negotiated collectively. Both explicitly and implicitly, identities can be re-engineered here. New forms can take shape, where earlier relationships with the dominant stories have failed.
For centuries the alchemical symbol of the Sun, the Circumpunct, has held the story and secrets of the intentional transformation of the human soul. Point zero, the single dot centred within a circle, providing a visual metaphor for the Fools journey. The outer circle is seen to represent the very potentiality of all that it is, and the journey of becoming that was known as the Magnus Opus “Great Work”. Held within, the central dot, the individual spark from which all stories begin. The source from which all transformations must occur. The direction of travel made known. To travel, to recast, and to grow, meant that one must turn to face the Sun within. Many would say we must first then, face east. The place of first light, new life, fresh beginnings, incarnation and resurrection.
Yet this is not simply a matter of direction. To face east is not to turn the body, but to turn one’s attention. It is to recognise that the source of light is not only something encountered in the world, but something that must be faced within it.
The circumpunct makes this clear. The journey does not begin in the circle, but in the point. It is from this point that all movement must occur. The Fool begins at the edge of his precipice, carried by circumstance, shaped by what has been given. With just one step, the Fool soon enough becomes The Magician, recognising that his movement in not random. Recognising that pattern, rhythm, and repetition are not incidental, but formative. Here, something begins to take form. Experience becomes something that is no longer only that which happens. It becomes something to be worked with. It becomes something intentional. An incantation for what one might become. Here, ritual emerges. Not as performance, nor as superstition, but as a method. A way of bringing attention, symbol, and action into alignment. A way of allowing meaning to move from abstraction into embodiment.
Where the Fool once wandered, the Magician participates. From within his participation calcination occurs. What was once carried unconsciously begins to take form. What was inherited begins to be reworked. What was fragmented begins, slowly, to cohere. This is not a movement away from the world, but a movement toward the center of it. Toward the point. The alchemical Sun, in this sense, is not simply a symbol of illumination, but of integration. Not something to be reached, but something to be realised as already present, though not yet consciously lived. To face the Sun within is to encounter the conditions of one’s own becoming. To stand within the heat of that process. To allow what is false, inherited, or no longer necessary to fall away.
This is not without cost. This is not an easy task. This is however, the work. And it is here that the journey resolves itself, not in completion, but as an orientation. The Fool does not disappear, nor does the Magician replace him. Rather, they become part of the same process. Their orientation turned towards the depths of what is yet to be known. With this, one continues to step into the unknown. Learning how to work with that which is found there. The Sun remaining at the center, illuminating the way. Not as an object of belief, but as a point of reference. A way of seeing. A way of standing. A way of living that does not remove us from the world, but returns us to it more fully. So, the journey does not take us away from the third stone from the sun. It returns us to it. More fully alive, more wholly ourselves, more real, time and time again. The place does not change. We do.
In the end, understanding alone is not enough. Action speaks louder than words alone.
This is the key that turns the lock.
