The Joker and Harley Quinn

I set out in my essay Percy Shelley and Bad Jubies to demonstrate how his maxim can be true:

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

In this essay, I will demonstrate again how a mere poet can wrest his or her work intricately into the greater cultural consciousness.

Aleister Crowley was dubbed by the yellow journalists of his time “the wickedest man in the world”, but by comparison to the truly wicked he was, at worst, a ribald jester.

I touched on the religion Crowley started briefly in my essay Did Hermann Hesse Meet Aleister Crowley?

The two essays linked above are not required reading to understand this one, but whether you work your way back to them or read them first, they are relevant.

What I want to focus on here are some very specific symbolic associations related to Thelema, but first I will digress to explain a little more of my background in the subject.

I was a solitary practitioner of various magic(k)al, mystical, and intellectual techniques of exegesis and enlightenment for years. I consider myself an artist-philosopher in the vein of Nietzsche first and foremost. My dabbling, as some might call it, was part of a more comprehensive study, first of my self, and secondly, of human nature and nurture. I have sometimes referred to myself as a student of comparative religion.

I do not claim to have any special knowledge, be a master of anything, nor am I offering myself as a sage or guru. More to the point, I think we as a species are transitioning from an era of “follow the leader” to an era of “do it yourself”. This would be consonant or resonant with the concept of moving from the Piscean Age to the Aquarian Age. I must leave it to the reader to work out any other associations, with Crowley’s Thelema, or their own particular beliefs.

I will leave the subject of my own subjective research with a final remark: I found more than one something, and if you go looking, you will also find; therefore, you should beware as to what sort of symbols you work with and through, as they tend to color your experience, sometimes to the point of distorting it unnecessarily.

In Crowley’s system, the “key to it all” is the two Hebrew letters Aleph and Lamed, which in English we will, for the sake of convenience, transliterate to AL.

Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It corresponds with Atu 0 of the Major Arcana in the Tarot: The Fool.

Lamed is the eleventh letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It corresponds with Atu VIII of the Tarot. Traditionally, this is “Justice” but in Crowley’s Book of Thoth it is “Adjustment”. Rather than a depiction of Lady Justice balancing the scales we have a female Harlequin using the tip of a great sword to achieve equilibrium, her head feathered like Ma’at, the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, Justice, Balance, Order.

For my rendering of this aspect of the arcanum, reference my poetic work The Fool and the Harlequin. Lo! Where the Fool wanders the Harlequin dances madly away!

In some Tarot decks, Justice is XI. VIII is traditionally “Strength”. Crowley interchanged these two trumps and renamed Strength—LUST. As to whether this latter association is a healthy one, I must leave to you to discover on your own if you dare, but I advise much forethought in the matter, having learned from bitter experience that there are traps laid everywhere in Crowley’s work, and that he was not alone in setting them. Step lightly! Look ahead!

The most important thing to remember for the sake of my argument here is that the Fool of the Tarot is intricately connected with the Harlequin, and this was supposed by Crowley himself, or, as he would have it, the preternatural intelligence that inspired the work, that this connection between Aleph and Lamed was the key to understanding the whole matter.

Enter the DC Universe, where we encounter, for the first time together, in the form of a children’s cartoon, the characters of The Joker and Harley Quinn.

The Joker is the iconic Batman villain. Bill Finger and Bob Kane created him in the middle of the last century, and he became a cultural phenomenon in his own right.

Harley Quinn, on the other hand, did not make her first appearance until the 1990s, as part of Batman: The Animated Series; but since her first appearance she captivated audiences, sometimes as a foil for the Joker’s antics, sometimes as an abused partner overcoming her trials, sometimes as a villain in her own right, and eventually as a sort of antihero, or even hero in her own right.

I would like to mention Batman: The Telltale Series, where the roles are cleverly transposed, and the Joker is the naive victim to Harley Quinn’s madness and possessiveness; so we see the trope turn completely around, as the best tropes will, completing itself as the fabled ouroboros consumes its own tail.

Note the eerie synchronicity between Crowley’s associations, which grew first out of thousands of years of mystic symbolism expressing itself across multiple cultures, and then out of his own personal mystical experience occurring in 1904, worming and navigating itself through bypaths and rabbit holes to iconic comic book characters that express, nevertheless, relevant cultural—and dare I say spiritual?—concepts in the modern day.

Now you might think that this would be the point where I would go in depth working out the associations for you; but no. I only point to them and leave it to you to decide which rabbit you want to follow. I am an artist-philosopher, not an academic, and tend to concur with Schopenhauer’s views on such pedantry, even if I don’t agree entirely with his pessimism.

Don’t follow me! Do it yourself! Or do something else!

But let me tell you: it was really nice of you to stop by and lend an ear to my rambling! If all you found here was a chuckle, then I must suppose that both the fool and the harlequin will approve, and that’s no jest, though I also admit that perhaps Hermann Hesse, once again, understood aright what the key to it must be, when he remarked in his eloquent take on the mid-life crisis, Steppenwolf:

“Eternity is a mere moment, only long enough for a joke.”