Card I : The Magician http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/sot/sot02.htm
The Symbolism of the Tarot (1913)
Context: I Saw the Man.
His figure reached from earth to heaven and was clad in a purple mantle. He stood deep in foliage and flowers and his head, on which was the head-band of an initiate, seemed to disappear mysteriously in infinity.
Before him on a cube-shaped altar were four symbols of magic — the sceptre, the cup, the sword and the pentacle.
His right hand pointed to heaven, his left to earth. Under his mantle he wore a white tunic girded with a serpent swallowing its tail.
His face was luminous and serene, and, when his eyes met mine, I felt that he saw most intimate recesses of my soul. I saw myself reflected in him as in a mirror and in his eyes I seemed to look upon myself.
And I heard a voice saying:
—"Look, this is the Great Magician!
“While I thus cogitate in disquiet and perplexity, half submerged in dark waters of a well in an Arabian oasis, I suddenly hear a voice from the background of my memory, the voice of an old Kurdish nomad: If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings. Whereupon, as if by magic, all disquiet leaves me. I begin to look upon myself with distant eyes, as you might look at the pages of a book to read a story from them; and I begin to understand that my life could not have taken a different course. For when I ask myself, 'What is the sum total of my life?' somthing in me seems to answer, 'You have set out to exchange one world for another-to gain a new world for yourself in exchange for an old one which you never really possessed.”
And I know with startling clarity that such an undertaking might indeed take an entire lifetime.
Page 48.
The Road to Mecca (1954)
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Muhammad Asad 35
Austro-Hungarian writer and academic 1900–1992Related quotes
“Running water never grows stale. So you just have to 'keep on flowing.”
Source: The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996), p. 48
When asked about listening to yourself.
Company Rules Interview https://companyrules.home.blog/2019/05/27/welcome-guest-dj-antonio-fresco/ (2019)
"Soliloquy for Cassandra"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)
Quoted in the Daily Mail (25 January 1943)
Introduction, sect. 6
La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie) (1960)