venicebard
Please feel free to ask any questions whatsoever, for clarification of obscure points—and don’t worry about me thinking them dumb or picky or critical, for first of all I realize both the tree-alphabet and my take on Kabbalah are new ground for most, and secondly I welcome discussion and feedback, both because I usually learn things and because I want others to understand what I consider to be the founding principles on which tarot (i.e. Tarot of Marseilles) stands.Curtis Penfold said:Your article is almost too comprehensive. It's not for the average reader, just saying. There's some parts that I got a little confused on how it related. I'll have to re-read it.
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I don't know. I'll have to hear this in layman's terms to completely understand everything mentioned.
I’ll just say, by way of bringing my take on Kabbalah into focus, that my main contribution to understanding the Sefirot is that whereas rabbinical scholars have traditionally tried to ‘explain away’ discrepancies between the descriptions of them given in the Bahir (12th-century Provence), Sefer Yetzirah (at least as old as the early centuries C.E.), and Zohar (13th-century Spain, though attributed to around the time of Christ), I take these as describing each a different world in which they manifest—Atzilut, the world of archetypes (suit of Clubs), Beriyah or ‘creation’ (suit of Swords), and Yetzirah or ‘formation’ (suit of Cups), respectively, the first three of the four worlds (in their order of generation). (And yes, I know SY is named after the third world, not the second, but this is demonstrably a blind—which is probably why its title is usually translated as ‘Book of Creation’.) These three correspond to—or represent the atmospheres of, so to speak—the three parts of a conscious self: knower (of things eternal or infinite in duration), thinker (of thought-forms with finite durations), and doer (to act in the present instant, which has no duration), respectively. [The doer or Son is the creator of the thought-forms (Brahma), the thinker or Holy Spirit is their preserver (Vishnu), and the knower or Father is the destroyer of illusion (Shiva, or Brahm).]
The fourth world (‘atmosphere’ of the body in which said self dwells) is Asiyah or ‘making’ (suit of Money, that is, of what one makes [ha, ha]), the world of physical time, whose correct hierarchy of planetary cycles, more or less, is preserved in ‘Hermetic Kabbalah’. It progresses from the eternal—1, the stellar heavens (fiery or radiant layer)—to the present—10, the diurnal cycle (earthy or solid layer), which stands for today—via cycles of descending length: 2, the sun or great year (airy layer’s receptivity to fire), 3 or Saturn (airy layer’s ability to act on water), 4 or Jupiter (airy layer’s ability to act on earth), 5 or Mars (watery or fluid layer’s ability to act on earth, 5 being numerologically -4), 6, the year (fluid layer’s ability to act on itself), 7 or Venus (fluid layer’s receptivity to itself), 8 or Mercury (fluid layer’s receptivity to air), and 9 the moon or month (fluid layer’s receptivity to fire).
The greater subdivision of tarot itself into three sections yields the purely numbered pips—which correspond to inner reality, desire, and ultimately the knower (which desire replaces in mere mortals such as ourselves)—the purely pictured-and-titled court cards—which correspond to external reality, feeling, and ultimately the thinker (which feeling replaces in mere mortals such as ourselves)—and the trumps, which are both numbered (ranked) and pictured-and-titled and thus the doorway between inner and outer, which is the Form Upright Sentience, whose various parts the letter-trumps represent (when I first started unraveling all this in 1972 I never dreamed I would be able to solve this aspect of it, but I did and can give all the correspondences if you’re interested). This third section corresponds to the body-mind and ultimately the doer (which the body-mind replaces in mere mortals such as ourselves).
The key to the solution of the ‘mystery’ of the trumps involves three main points.
First, two extra letters (past the 20 of Irish ogham) were hypothesized by Robert Graves (in The White Goddess) as having been kept secret—a doubled A (Aa, palm) and doubled I (Ii, mistletoe)—which I can present further argument for, based in part on a fact which Graves overlooked: that Hebrew yod does indeed hover above the line on which one writes, just as mistletoe is rooted in a tree, not in soil. (Yod itself probably stood, rather, for the mistletoe-like loranthus, which by the way likes growing on oaks, unlike mistletoe, which had to be grafted thereonto.) This means single I must be zayin—Greek zeta being the initial of Zeus because of erosion of D by I or Y—which I deduced from runes, which has an I-shaped I for ‘icicle’ and a tilted-Z-shaped I for ‘yew’, the tree-name of Irish I. By process of elimination, then, Aa turns out to be consonant teyt or theta (the rune ‘day’) and thus a vowel only by bardic reasoning; yet this last must be true, I have reasoned, since the vowels are breaths, and A represents the doer’s breath or activity and O and U the parts of the breaths of thinker and knower that are in the doer’s atmosphere, leaving Aa-E-I-Ii to represent the breaths of fire-air-water-earth, respectively: Aa, palm, is thus the phoenix (which means palm), born in fire; E, quivering aspen, shimmers in the slightest breeze; I, yew, represents death and thus both the sea (the ‘death’ of rivers) and the barrier of water separating the living from the dead; and Ii, mistletoe, represents that which is purified out of earth, contact with which was carefully avoided in the druidic ritual of its harvest (according to Pliny the Elder). (It is interesting to note that palm in Hebrew is tamar, and although it starts with tav, not teyt, there are instances in other roots where the two become interchanged.)
Second, the numbers given the tree-letters in Irish medieval literature are known only for 0-16, thus necessitating the solution to the mystery of 17-21. Yet this puzzle turns out to be a very simple one to solve. A and I are 1 and 3, hence Aa and Ii are first- and third-from-the-end, respectively (as their trumps confirm). K is 9, hence Kk (Q the apple, which still pictures fruit-with-stem) is 18. U’s natural place would have been 5, since 1-4 are A-E-I-O and since V (U) is Roman numeral 5, so it naturally falls at fifth-from-the-end or 17 (which its trump easily confirms), and indeed U or heather represents the full moon and summer and symbolizes love’s consummation, one’s ‘coming of age’ (rune U is *uruz, aurochs, and pictures its horn, whose acquisition as drinking horn was a Germanic warrior’s symbol he had ‘come of age’), 17 being when one ‘came of age’ in Irish myth (mentioned in Ellis’s book The Druids). And this leaves 20 to be Ss, straif or strife, the blackthorn, 20 being the number representing ‘fair combat’—10 digits versus 10 digits, XV The Devil being unfair combat, in which one combatant has one hand tied behind his back or restrained in some way—and indeed XX Judgment or Judgment Day is the ultimate strife (i.e. between knowledge and illusion).
And third—the step necessary also to fathoming the court cards—the letters must be correctly assigned their places about the round(s), as the 7 doubles are unassigned thereto in Sefer Yetzirah and the order of the 12 simples was jumbled in forming the alef-bet. This last is easily confirmed by the shapes of the letters, since they only picture their respective parts of the body (as zodiac signs) once their order is corrected based on calendar-order (of tree-letters) and the intrinsic phonetic structure of the bardic alphabet. This last has a beautiful simplicity about it, in that the ‘Cauldron’ of the doubles, which is lower half of the surroundings, represents the mouth—with B and P on the inner and outer lip or rim, G and K with guttural R between them down at the throat or gullet (where the drain would be), and D and T in between—and the World Egg that sits in it—the zodiac of the seated body, with its twelve simples—represents the tongue. On the tongue’s top half are L-N-V/F-S-H, which go out the tongue voiced and back unvoiced: but whereas pagans had F on the tip—whose sound is formed out beyond the tip and stands for the Corn Spirit sprouting out beyond the seed—Semites had there instead an s-sound, samekh (whose shape is that of aries the head), which is actually on the tongue’s tip. And on the tongue’s bottom half (at the tongue-root) are U-O-A-Aa-E-I-Ii (from front to back, since U or “oo” involves pinching-off the front of the mouth and I or “ee” the pinching-off of the back of the mouth), with A replaced by Q at virgo (K’s sign) when A (alef) takes its place at the center of said wheel: for the mothers mem-shin-alef represent, respectively, the (knower’s) wheel centered atop standing Adam Qadmon (the Form Upright Sentience), the (thinker’s) wheel centered atop seated Adam (us), and the (doer’s) wheel centered at the heart of Adam (i.e. the zodiac of the seated torso). The reason for this assignment of the mothers involves the Logos, which I believe my article addresses at some point. The fourth wheel, then, is that of the womb, a baby’s rotation from head-up to head-down thereon signaling it is ready to be born.
This means the simples are in the order (starting at aries) samekh-tzaddi-cheyt-vav-ayin-qof-teyt-heh-zayin-yod-lamedh-nun (which their shapes verify). And this means that of the letters of the Name only vav is on the outer or female side of the round (where the breasts are), the other three (yod and the two hehs) being on the inner or male side of the round (where the backbone is). Judging from the fact that the right pillar Jachin appears on the throne of the King of Clubs, to be joined by the left pillar Boaz on that of the Queen of Swords, and that the Knight of Cups is the Grail Knight, and that the Knave of Money is the one with two coins (one lying on the ground next to him), these four represent, respectively, the yod, the vav, the first heh, and the second heh in their elements (which ‘Hermetic Kabbalah’ also seemingly got right, though their assignment of elements to the middle two worlds is actually reversed, for reasons I won’t go into here [unless asked]).
I hope this clarifies somewhat (and I’ll stop here, hopefully short of making things too complicated-seeming).