Aye that door knocker is a special detail. I had it pegged as a coyote face, which I guess is somewhere between wolf and fox.Jerry Horne wrote:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=coyot ... ource=univ
I suppose I'm drawn to that conclusion because I like the coyote for its symbolic value, as a special icon (creator as trickster).
Tarot Cards! I'm a collector of these.Jerry Horne wrote:Interestingly enough, on some tarot cards for 'The Fool' there is a fox at the foot of he Fool.
The Fool reversed cautions you about potentially being taken advantage of or entering into a deal where you do not fully understand the consequences of your decisions.
The Rider-Waite Tarot Fool is a good fit, both for a wolf or a coyote (the GD Fool card had a child with a wolf on a leash sitting in a rose garden iirc). The negative version of the Rider-Waite fool would seem to be a recklessly carefree or preoccupied vagabond figure, so caught up in his otherwordly thoughts that he doesn't even notice the dog/animal biting at his heels. The iconography is redolent of Breugel's The Misanthrope, insofar as the fool like the misanthrope has left worldly interest behind. Also the Fool is about to walk off a cliff, for the same reasons. Is this Hastings -- so preoccupied with the zone that he forgets about his worldly situation? Principal, husband, fisherman.
The positive meaning represents the pre-beginning of things, the impulse that sets things in motion before anything descends into world of action. And on a higher level, the Fool is the Ipsissimus, the 'one who is most himself'. In Magick: Theory and Practice, Crowley claimed the Ipsissimus was an adept who acted without acting -- whereas in the form of a Magus (the following card 'The Magician') the adept accomplishes his will by ensuring that his every action is triangulated by an action that negates it -- the Ipsissimus is somehow above and beyond such dualities. If the Magician is one who longs to see, the Fool is one who has already seen, and is for that transcendental, unworldly, beyond the pale.
The downside of even the positive (non-inverted) Fool is that the Fool can represent leaving the world behind, 'travelling very light' in terms of material concerns and relationships. The Fool is an 'idiot' in the etymological sense, seen in classical Roman times as an extremely private person who refuses to take part in the civic and public life of the city, instead aspiring to remain outside human laws. Not so much a simpleton as a absolute separatist -- a solipsist -- he was also considered in law as caput lupinum, a 'wolfshead'. He belongs to neither nature (the rural) nor culture (the city) but chants out between two worlds, trapped on the threshold, either walled up with the mad at the city margins or kept at bay from entering beyond these city termini (literally, 'ex-terminated'). Historically, he's a deeply tragic figure usually banned from law (which means anyone can kill him without incurring the charge of murder); mythologically he's like Robin Hood or any number of outcast figures with secret ties to, or knowledge of, the city establishment or hierarchy.
Bringing only this tiny fragment of the existing intertextual iconography of wolves, coyotes and outsider-tricksters into play, it's safe to say this door knocker is a fitting emblem for the fact that Hastings has seen too much, and is earmarked for nonexistence. It's a doom-laden moment when we see it.