Today, 15 August, is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to Catholic teaching, at the completion of her earthly life, Mary was taken body and soul into heavenly glory.
It is the body and soul part that fascinates me.
Mary does not simply shed her mortal body so that her soul can escape to somewhere more spiritual. She is taken whole. Her physical humanity is not left behind as something unnecessary once her earthly life is complete.
And Mary is not the only figure in our sacred stories associated with entering Heaven without the ordinary corruption of the body. Enoch was simply “taken” by God. Elijah disappeared into Heaven in a whirlwind. Christ ascended bodily. Paul even envisioned a time when some would be transformed without first passing through death.
Again and again, we encounter the strange idea that the boundary between embodied earthly existence and heavenly existence may not be quite as absolute as we imagine.
But I am less interested today in trying to work out how such things might happen than in asking what the Assumption can teach those of us who remain very firmly embodied here on Earth.
Because perhaps the Assumption is not merely an extraordinary privilege granted to Mary.
Perhaps it is also symbolic of human destiny.
If the Incarnation tells us that Heaven can enter matter, the Assumption completes the movement by showing matter entering Heaven.
As above, so below. And as below, so above.
What if sanctification was never supposed to mean escaping our humanity?
What if nothing human needs to be left behind?
Jump to the Feast of the Assumption Tarot Spread
She Wasn’t the First to Be Taken
As extraordinary as the Assumption of Mary sounds, the idea of a human being entering Heaven without undergoing the ordinary corruption of the body is not unique to her.
The Hebrew Scriptures give us two particularly striking examples.
Enoch’s departure is described with almost startling simplicity:
“Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him.”
— Genesis 5:24
There is no death scene. No burial. Enoch simply walks with God until, somehow, he is no longer here.
Elijah’s departure is considerably more dramatic. As he walks with Elisha, a chariot and horses of fire appear and Elijah is taken up to Heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11). Once again, there is no ordinary death or burial.
Then, of course, there is Christ.
Christian theology makes an important distinction between the Ascension of Christ and the Assumption of Mary. Christ ascends by his own divine power. Mary is assumed — received into Heaven by God. Yet both preserve the extraordinary image of embodied humanity crossing the boundary between Earth and Heaven.
Paul takes the idea further still.
Writing about the return of Christ, the Parousia, he tells the Corinthians:
“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
— 1 Corinthians 15:51
Some, he believed, would still be alive when Christ returned. Rather than dying and leaving their bodies behind, they would be changed.
Enoch is taken. Elijah is taken. Christ ascends. Mary is assumed. Paul anticipates humanity itself being transformed.
Together these events suggest something rather beautiful:
The body is not necessarily the thing we must escape in order to reach God.
As Above, So Below: Heaven Does Not Reject Matter
There is an old temptation in spiritual life to divide reality neatly in two.
Spirit is good. Matter is troublesome. Heaven is sacred. Earth is fallen. The soul is eternal, while the body is merely something we temporarily inhabit.
From that perspective, salvation can begin to look suspiciously like an escape plan.
Yet the central mysteries of Christianity tell a very different story.
In the Incarnation, God enters matter.
The Resurrection transforms matter.
In the Ascension, embodied humanity enters the heavenly realm.
And in the Assumption, Mary follows the same upward movement.
The pattern is not one of rejection, but circulation.
Heaven descends into Earth, and Earth is raised towards Heaven.
This is where the old Hermetic principle as above, so below becomes particularly interesting. We usually think of it as describing how Earth reflects heavenly realities. But the Assumption invites us to contemplate the movement in both directions.
The Assumption presents the same spiritual pattern: transformation rather than annihilation.
As above, so below. And as below, so above.
Many of us learned the simplified scientific principle that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. This gives adds another layer through the conservation of mass-energy: what appears to disappear does not simply fall into nothingness.
Matter is not discarded. It is changed.
Perhaps that is precisely why the Assumption feels so significant. It does not present holiness as the final victory of spirit over matter, but as the possibility of matter itself participating in transformation.
Mary’s own story embodies both movements.
At the Annunciation, the Divine enters her physical body and the Word becomes flesh.
At the Assumption, Mary’s physical humanity is received into divine glory.
Annunciation: Heaven enters Mary.
Assumption: Mary enters Heaven.
The movement that begins with incarnation ends with integration.
Nothing is discarded. Nothing worthy of redemption is treated as spiritual waste.
Mary goes whole.
Sanctification Is Integration, Not Amputation
Perhaps one of the most damaging ideas we can carry into spiritual life is that holiness requires us to become less human.
We divide ourselves into what we consider sacred and profane. Love belongs in the Temple, but anger does not. Faith is welcome, doubt is embarrassing. We elevate Spirit while treating the body, with its appetites, limitations, ageing and eventual death, as something to overcome.
We can end up trying to amputate parts of ourselves in the name of becoming whole.
The Assumption offers a very different image.
Mary goes whole.
This does not mean that everything within us should remain exactly as it is. Integration is not the same as indulgence. We still need transformation.
But transformation is not eradication.
Our grief can become compassion. Anger can reveal where a boundary has been violated. Desire can teach us what we value. Fear can show us what needs tenderness or courage. Even our wounds can become places through which we recognise the wounds of others.
We need not place anything within us permanently outside the reach of the Divine.
Perhaps sanctification is not the gradual removal of everything messy, earthly and inconvenient until only our acceptable “spiritual” self remains.
Perhaps it is the opposite.
We bring it all.
And we allow the Divine to transform what is human rather than trying to discard it
If we can receive the Assumption as a symbol of that possibility, Mary’s journey into Heaven no longer seems quite so remote from our own lives.
And we can stop leaving pieces of ourselves behind.
The Feast of the Assumption Tarot Spread
The Assumption invites us to contemplate two movements: the Divine descending into matter and humanity being raised towards the Divine.
For this reason, the spread takes the form of a hexagram, or Star of David. The downward-pointing triangle represents Incarnation: as above, so below. The upward-pointing triangle represents Assumption: as below, so above.
Where the two triangles meet, Heaven and Earth are reconciled.
▽ The Descending Triangle — Incarnation
1. Heaven — What Seeks Embodiment?
What spiritual truth, gift or potential is seeking expression through my human life?
2. Fiat — What Must I Receive?
What am I being invited to welcome rather than resist?
3. Incarnation — Where Must This Become Real?
Where in my ordinary, embodied life must this spiritual truth take flesh?
△ The Ascending Triangle — Assumption
4. Earth — What Have I Rejected?
What part of my humanity have I judged unworthy, inconvenient or insufficiently spiritual?
5. Sanctification — What Can Be Transformed?
What am I being invited to integrate rather than amputate?
6. Assumption — What Can Be Raised?
What becomes possible when I bring this part of myself consciously into relationship with the Divine?
7. The Centre — As Above, So Below
How can Heaven and Earth become one in me?
Place Card 7 at the centre of the hexagram, where the ascending and descending triangles interpenetrate.
In the Qabalistic symbolism of the Golden Dawn, the centre naturally calls to mind Tiphareth, the sphere of the Sun: the place of harmony, integration and the reconciliation of apparent opposites.
The aim of this spread is therefore not to identify which parts of ourselves are sufficiently spiritual to take with us.
It asks a much more interesting question:
What might happen if we brought our whole humanity to the Divine and allowed it to be transformed?
Sample Reading with Robert Wang’s Golden Dawn Tarot
For my sample reading, I used Robert Wang’s Golden Dawn Tarot.
Since this spread is built around the movement of Heaven into Earth and Earth back towards Heaven, the Golden Dawn deck seemed especially appropriate. Its esoteric structure is based on forces descending through the Four Worlds towards manifestation.
And once I started looking at their Golden Dawn correspondences, the pattern became rather difficult to ignore.
1. Heaven — What Seeks Embodiment?
We begin at the Source.
Book T calls the Ace of Cups the Root of the Powers of the Waters. The Divine Hand emerges from the clouds holding the cup while water pours from it into the pool below. Book T associates it with fertility, productiveness, beauty and happiness.
The Ciceros place the Ace of Cups in Kether of Briah, the Crown of the Creative World. For them, this is Primal Water at the beginning of creativity and Divine Consciousness.
Wang describes Cups as belonging to Briah, the Creative World and “realm of Pure Idea.”
So what seeks embodiment through me is something that exists before I have turned it into a teaching, an article, a ritual or even a completely formed thought.
It is the current itself.
The Ace receives.
Then it overflows.
I don’t need to manufacture the Divine or somehow drag something spiritual down from Heaven.
The water is already descending.
My task is receptivity.
And then, perhaps, getting out of the way sufficiently for what I receive to keep flowing.
2. Fiat — What Must I Receive?
Oh, come on.
For Fiat — the position representing Mary’s willingness to receive — I pull the Golden Dawn Lord of Love.
Venus in Cancer. Chokmah in Briah.
Book T describes the card as “Harmony of masculine and feminine united.”
The Ciceros make this particularly interesting for the spread. They describe the 2 of Cups as the union of Father-Fire and Mother-Water. Through that marriage, the Primal Waters can continue their descent towards material Earth.
In other words, creation requires relationship.
Wang adds another layer. As the dynamic force of Chokmah enters Briah, he says that perfect harmony begins to differentiate and the possibility of directing the energy well or badly appears.
The One has become Two.
Perhaps Fiat is therefore not passive submission.
It is consent to relationship.
Divine and human.
Spirit and matter.
Heaven and Earth.
Masculine and feminine.
Difference is not the problem. Without difference there can be no relationship, and without relationship there can be no incarnation.
The Ace brings the Water.
The Two says yes to receiving it.
3. Incarnation — Where Must This Become Real?
And suddenly the reading catches fire.
The King of Wands is Fire of Fire.
The Ciceros describe the Kings as the Yod-Fire force of Tetragrammaton within each suit. The King of Wands is therefore the most concentrated expression of Fire: volatile, ecstatic, initiating and enormously powerful.
Their description of him is the first spark of action.
Wang’s explanation of the King principle is even more striking in this position. He describes the King as the “vital principle as it pours forth into existence.”
I pulled that for Incarnation.
That’ll do.
Whatever I receive through the Ace and 2 of Cups cannot remain a beautiful interior spiritual experience.
It has to become real.
Write it.
Make it.
Practise it.
Live it.
Put it into service.
Fire of Fire is not interested in admiring revelation from a comfortable distance.
It initiates.
There is a warning here too. The Ciceros compare this kind of Fire to something that erupts with tremendous force but may not naturally endure.
So inspiration alone is not incarnation.
The spark needs a body.
Which, as it happens, is exactly where the other triangle begins.
4. Earth — What Have I Rejected?
This card changes the reading enormously.
The Golden Dawn title is Great Strength.
Moon in Sagittarius. Yesod in Atziluth.
Book T describes “tremendous and steady force that cannot be shaken”, although that strength may arrive through strife, apprehension and fear. It also associates the card with strength, power and recovery.
The Ciceros point out something even more interesting.
The 9 of Wands is Yesod in Atziluth.
Yesod means Foundation.
So in the position called Earth, asking what part of my humanity I may have judged insufficiently spiritual, I get Foundation in the world of Fire.
That feels significant.
Perhaps what I have rejected is not weakness at all.
Perhaps it is my survival strength.
The stubborn part.
The part that keeps going.
The part that braces itself when necessary and simply refuses to collapse.
Spirituality can make endurance look rather grubby compared with surrender, receptivity and mystical openness.
But there are times when endurance is sacred too.
The 9 of Wands does contain fear and apprehension. It isn’t serene.
It is strength that knows why strength is necessary.
Maybe I don’t need to transcend that part of myself.
Maybe I need to stop treating it as spiritually inferior simply because difficulty forged it.
5. Sanctification — What Can Be Transformed?
Now the Fire of the 9 of Wands meets Earth.
The Prince of Pentacles is Air of Earth.
Book T describes this force as one that solidifies and practically applies things. It is steady and reliable.
The Ciceros develop that beautifully. Their Prince of Pentacles takes intelligence, planning and consciousness — Air — and puts them to work inside the material world.
He doesn’t escape Earth.
He organises it.
Cultivates it.
Makes something useful from it.
They even describe him as providing a channel through which Spirit can act upon the element of Earth.
And Wang places the Princes in Tiphareth. He calls Tiphareth “the Christ centre”, where the power from above is “stepped down” towards our world.
The Ciceros are slightly more cautious here, noting that the court cards are better thought of as bordering these Sephiroth rather than being rigidly confined to them. But the Tiphareth relationship remains.
That makes the Prince of Pentacles extraordinary in the position of Sanctification.
What does sanctification transform?
The raw endurance of the 9 of Wands becomes embodied practice.
Strength becomes consistency.
Persistence becomes service.
Spiritual intention becomes something I actually do.
Sanctification doesn’t make Earth less earthy; it makes Earth increasingly capable of carrying Spirit.
6. Assumption — What Can Be Raised?
And here comes the second Prince.
Again, Wang’s Tiphareth correspondence is immediately relevant.
But this time we have Air of Water.
The Ciceros describe the Prince of Cups as the mental and intellectual faculty operating within the subconscious realm of Water.
This is fascinating because the Prince is not trying to get rid of Water’s emotional, imaginative or mysterious nature.
Air enters it.
Consciousness enters the depths.
The Prince is artistic, mysterious and intensely transformative. His apparent calm conceals a great deal of power beneath the surface.
So what can be raised?
My emotional and imaginative life.
My intuition.
The subconscious.
Even the parts of myself that are difficult to explain rationally.
The answer is not to drain the water.
It is to bring consciousness into relationship with it.
Feeling can become compassion.
Experience can become meaning.
Intuition can become prayer.
The unconscious can participate consciously in spiritual life.
And because this card falls in Assumption, the imagery becomes particularly beautiful.
What is raised towards the Divine is not a cleaned-up version of myself from which all troublesome emotional depth has been removed.
Deep calls unto deep.
7. The Centre — As Above, So Below
And then we reach the centre.
Fire of Earth.
Honestly, I don’t think the reading could have finished much better.
The King of Pentacles is the fiery Yod principle operating within Earth.
The Ciceros describe him as the Father-Fire entering the physical universe and stimulating growth, vegetation and material production.
The card itself is full of fertility imagery: fertile land, ripened corn and the stag, whose antlers fall and regenerate.
Fire does not hover above Earth.
It enters it.
And makes something grow.
Wang assigns Pentacles to Assiah, quite simply the “world of matter.”
So at the centre of a spread asking how Heaven and Earth can become one in me, I pull the Divine Fire operating inside matter.
Not escaping or conquering matter.
Not waiting patiently for matter to get out of the way.
Inside it.
That is the whole thesis of the article in one card.
Perhaps Heaven and Earth become one when the spiritual impulse penetrates ordinary life deeply enough to make it fertile.
Ideas become work.
Prayer becomes action.
Love becomes service.
Inspiration becomes something tangible.
A seed does not fulfil its purpose by remaining safely above the soil.
It goes into the Earth.
And something grows.
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Lisa Eddy — Tamar Iris LeFay
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