16 JinGuiXiaHai 金龜下海

Golden Turtle Plunges into the Ocean

XII: The Hanged Man

"Don't forget to blast them kids."
--@phil

"The Golden Turtle is a symbol for longevity, the northern direction, and the spiritual energy related to the prenatal energy of the kidney. Xia means plunge into, submerge, lower, reduce, descend. Hai means sea, ocean. Water is the prenatal root of life on Earth and of memory. This movement is a symbol for returning to the Dao. It is related to the shamanic way of understanding the cycles of life and death."

-- Master Wu

This card reminds me of that sweeping arm movement. The water, the descent.

There's something distinctly renal about this card, about poisons being filtered out, the serpent of Scorpionic putrefaction transmuting death to new life. The sea is rotten and alive.

"Homo Sapiens is a marine mammal, and our intra-uterine existence is passed in the Amniotic Fluid. The legend of Noah, the Ark and the Flood, is no more than a hieratic presentation of the facts of life. It is then to Water that the Adepts have always looked for the continuation (in some sense or other) and to the prolongation and perhaps renovation of life."

-- Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth