Qaballah and Tarot

Dragonfly

Thank you Steve I very new at all this and I love the info. But it would be great to have a book that we all have to study with and then bring more infor. as we go along. If that's O.K. with everyone else. Have a great weekend everyone. :)
 

Ravenswing

text suggestion

hi, me again--

i just cruised around my library and amazon. there is an excellent book on the kabala available (i just ordered it; my last copy was lent to someone who didn't believe in returning book-- then moved...

anyhow, it's The Mystical Qabalah by Dion Fortune. it covers the tree sphere by sphere. Ms Fortune was a member of the Golden Dawn, the magickal mystery lodge where most of the modern view of hermetic qabalah has come from

(i guess i'm going to switch horse in mid-stream and start spelling it qabalah)

there is a chapter dedicated to each sephiroth, and she is one of the clearest and concise writers in this field,and is my bid for a text

(oh yeah, it's about $12.00 new from amazon, a reasonable price for a wonderful book)

but, no matter what book we choose, i think a chapter/week will give us time for digestion and discussion.

anybody know if we could get a chat room somehow and keep transcripts for anyone who is absent??

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steve
 

jmd

I would personally agree with stevepolsz when he says 'good kabala builds from a sturdy foundation; don't build your house on sand...'. In Kabbalah, and especially as it relates to the Golden Dawn, such foundational text is the Sefer/Sepher Ye(t)zirah. Here is the translation by Westcott made available to members of the GD.

D. Fortune's book, and G. Knight's expansion on the same, are excellent... but I would first recommend the classic foundational text.
 

Kaz

jmd, thanks for posting that link, very interesting reading there. have you got more of those?

kaz
 

jmd

Kaz, I have a few other links to various related topics of interest, which I'll post if they become relevant.

The Sefer Yetzirah (Short Version) begins:
Sefer Yetzirah

1:1 With 32 wondrous paths of Wisdom [Hockmah] engrave Yah [ie, the first 2 letters of the tetragrammaton: YHVH], the Lord of Hosts, with three books/words [sepharim]: with text (Sepher), with number (Sephar), and with communication (Sippur)
another version gives these three as word, number and idea, ie, each has three 'values' inherent: a number, a word, and a symbol... as does each Major Arcana of the Tarot!
1:2 Ten Sefirot of Nothingness [or out of nothingness] plus 22 letters: Three Mothers, Seven Doubles, and Twelve Elementals.
Shall we begin with the ten Sephiroth from nothing (Ain-Sof)?

The first is Keter (Kether) Crown...
 

Ravenswing

number, word, symbol...

hello all--

i'll like to make a point here. while dealing with the Hebrew language, we are dealing with a different mind set then our own.
each of the 'letters' of this alphabet not only represented what we would consider a letter. they also were a word. to make matters a bit more complicated, they also represented a number.
(Think of roman numerals...)
let me elaborate a bit. the first letter of the hebrew alphabet is called aleph. aleph, when spelled out means "ox", and has the numerical value of one.

so we have the symbol for a letter, a word from a letter, and a numerical value for a letter.

(This was quite a confusing point to me when i first encountered it... but let's think back. have you ever sent out a coded message to some one? "Oh yeah, a = 1, b = 2... "

so 22 - 15 - 18 - 4 is the code for 'word'

we can spell out an english letter-- 'k' can be spelled 'kay'-- it's just that most of our letters don't become words

( "What about 'eye', or 'see'??" "No, it's not 'see', it's 'sea'!!!')

so you see, the symbol, the word and the number are intrinsically intertwined in hebrew-- a trinity of sorts.

we will see many trinities come up in our studies. perhap a good meditation for the moment is to consider some.

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steve
 

spiritlady

hi every one I have been wanting to learn more about the Qabalah with Tarot for a long time, but haven't been able to find anyone who knows anything about it, so was really please to see you have decided to start a study group You all seem very knowledgable on it . I am going to try to get the books suggested and will also look at the web sites that some of you posted and try my best to keep up
 

Ravenswing

you say colour, i say color

Hi all--

a note before we get to a confusing point.

("Isn't this confusing enough already?")

i've already mention this before, but i think it's important enough to repeat. before we TRANSLATE a hebrew word into english, we will be TRANSLITERATING terms/words from the hebrew alphabet to the english alphabet.

some of the hebrew letters can be represented by more than one english letter. add on top of that the idea that hebrew does not represent vowels in the same manner as we do...

for example, the first sephirah is transliterated either Keter or Kether. (I'm pretty sure there's only these two, but don't hold me to it!!)

I'll try to center on one particular spelling, but it will be important down the path to realize this point

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steve
 

Driley

Wow!

See what happens when I go AWOL for a few days?

Thank you -- everyone -- for your enthusiastic response!

So, I haven't gotten my copy of Wang's book yet (drat!) but have been reading Chicken Qabalah (I'm now a certified Chicken Qabalist and have a certificate to that effect hanging on my wall at work), Qabalistic Concepts by Wm. Grey (not exactly what I was hoping for, but with at least a few interesting chapters), and the Book of Thoth (again, just scanning for the Qabally parts).

You have been on my mind, at least.

Perhaps we could start with a discussion around the numbered cards of the Minor Arcana and how the meanings they carry relate to the Tree of Life? (While everyone scrambles to get a text and start reading...)

For example, do the 4's all reflect some form of mercy? In their traditional meanings, can you find how that plays out?

How do the various suits express themselves differently on the Tree of Life?

(Let's ignore the Major Arcana and the Court Cards for the moment, since they can be a little trickier to address -- at least at first.)

If this seems an agreeable course of initial speculation, to rein us in and get us begun, I'll post two or three different suggested schema which purport to tie meanings to the tree and we can see which of them comes closest to our understanding of the Sephiroth and the Tarot.

Blessings,
David
 

jmd

The correlations between the Kabbalah and Tarot which various authors make are numerous. For example, if we start with KTR (Kether/Keter... just to add another occasional transliteration!), authors which follow the Golden Dawn tradition will link the aces... but Wirth and others link the Magician to Keter!

If leaving the Major Arcana out of the picture is here appropriate... so would leaving the minor arcana out.

Keter, as the first emanation, is also, along with the next two, sometimes referred to as the supernals. These first three emanations are such that manifestation only begins following these. Keter (Crown) is appropriately also sometimes referred to as the Prime Mover (for those interested, it is at times also linked to the Seraphim). As such, it provides the impulses for 'later' actual movement to occur.

Personally, I find the correlation between the pips and the Sephiroth often muddies rather than clarifies understanding. The thread on Tarot of the Sephiroth already makes Golden Dawn associations, and I would have thought that discussing various views and deepening our understanding of the Kabbalah for the sake of our understanding of the Tarot would be one of the opportunities offered by this wonderful thread.