Platonic Solids in the Thoth Tarot

I was oddly intrigued by a post in this thread mentioning Platonic Solids in reference to the High Priestess card in the Thoth deck.

Afterwards, I began seeing them a lot in the deck, and after a little exploration (see this page: http://www.mathsisfun.com/platonic_solids.html for a basic dummies' intro, which I needed), I found some really beautiful patterns. So I thought I'd lay them out in case anyone cared

Things that resemble Platonic Solids appear in nine cards that I found:
The Fool
The High Priestess
The Tower
The Star (?)
Prince of Swords
Queen of Disks
Princess of Disks
5 of Cups
3 of Disks

This site explains that four of the five Platonic Solids were assigned to the ancient elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. So if we look at the above-mentioned cards, we see the following:

The Fool holds an octahedron in his right hand. This PS is attributed to Air, as is The Fool.

The High Priestess has four shapes that resemble PS's at the bottom of the card. Three of them are recognisably the tetrahedron (Fire), octahedron (Air) and dodecahedron. The fourth, at bottom left, vaguely resembles an icosahedron (Water). Of these, the dodecahedron is the one not attributed to an ancient element, and the cube (Earth) is missing. This suggests that she is not connected to the material but has access to Spirit, which we may infer is attributable to the dodecahedron.

The Tower has three humanoid figures flying from the blasted Tower. These figures are represented as being made up of tetrahedra, attributed to Fire. The card is, of course, referred to Mars, a fiery planet, and the image is itself fiery.

The Star demonstrates shapes at the bottom which resemble PS's, but I can't identify them. They most resemble the icosahedron, which is referred to Water; but the Star is attributed to Aquarius, an Air sign. The spirals in the whole card make me think of Fibonacci numbers - or am I insane? Can anyone shed light on this one?

The Prince of Swords' (Air of Air) chariot has a huge, perfect octohedron (Air) in glowing yellow and orange.

The Queen of Swords has my personal favourite of them all. Her staff is topped by an icosahedron within a cube - Water of Earth. Beautiful.

The Princess of Disks' wand has a base formed from an octohedron - attributed to Air. This one also confuses me as there should be cubes all over the place - anyone got any wisdom there?

The 5 of Cups (Mars in Scorpio) has tetrahedra forming the bases of the Cups, so representing the Fire within the card.

The 3 of Disks shows a large tetrahedron from above joining the three Disks; again representing Mars' fiery energy within this frozen Capricornian waste.

I would really welcome any corrections to this analysis; and clarifications on the points I'm vague on would be great!

\m/ Kat

gaming dice = playtime!

I like to make arrangements with varied colors (assigned according to element) of gamer's polyhedral dice sets. We sit down and stack them in various orders to see which "tower" is more stable, more attractive, etc.

I use the 2 versions of the d10 & dTens to feature percentages of Light and Darkness.

The Harmony of the World

One could make the case they ought be called Pythagorean Solids, though I suspect he acquired their gnosis via Chaldean & Egyptian mysteries. In any case, he is attributed with "discovering" four of them (one of his students, as I recall, was credited with the dodecahedron); there is, however, a set of stone polyhedra from Neolithic Scotland much older.

thorhammer said:

The High Priestess has four shapes that resemble PS's at the bottom of the card. Three of them are recognisably the tetrahedron (Fire), octahedron (Air) and dodecahedron. The fourth, at bottom left, vaguely resembles an icosahedron (Water). Of these, the dodecahedron is the one not attributed to an ancient element, and the cube (Earth) is missing. This suggests that she is not connected to the material but has access to Spirit, which we may infer is attributable to the dodecahedron.

Click to expand...

The Solid 'vaguely resembling the Isis-ahedron' is actually called a rhombic dodecahedron and was first described by Kepler in his study of snowflake geometry by way of beehives and pomegranates. See http://www.keplersdiscovery.com/Proportion.html and friends.

How these "Pythagorean" therions fit together is at the heart of this Book of Thoth.

Yygdrasilian said:

there is, however, a set of stone polyhedra from Neolithic Scotland much older.

Click to expand...

That's very interesting. Do you have bibliography or a link?

Are they older than this Roman one? -
http://www.christies.com/Lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385

I really would be very interested to see a neolithic set of such solids.

Function Unknown

Ross G Caldwell said:

That's very interesting. Do you have bibliography or a link?

I really would be very interested to see a neolithic set of such solids.

Click to expand...

Apologies for not providing this before...

http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/neolithic.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_Stone_Balls
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/virtualmuseum...x=&viewnumber=0&desc=DESC&startat=0&info=hide

They are dated late Neolithic to Bronze Age, 3000 - 2000 BC, and include more than just the 5 'Pythagorean' Solids.

Kat,

Thanks for this thread. I will be stealing everyone's insights for personal gain!

LOL,
Nicky

No worries. I'm doing the same in yours.

Personally, I haven't found anything overly ground-breaking in these. To me they've been used as just another way to unite many different traditions and use symbols from those traditions to represent the same idea in one card (like the Queen of Disks - I love that card! She's wonderful!).

\m/ Kat

I found another one!

8 of Wands Swiftness, Mercury in Sagittarius, features . . . well, I can't quite get my eyes in. It seems to alternate, to my eyes, between an octohedron (Air) and two tetrahedra, one on top of the other (Fire). Both attributions make sense. That's top to bottom; if you try to bend your eyes you can also "see" what might be two regular square-based pyramids (not Platonic solids) going front to back, with their points offset from the centre of the card.

The whole seems to slide around like when you take two magnets and try to push the same poles together and they slide away from each other - anything but to sit right against each other neatly. This seems to do the same with my eyes, and to me that really does gel with the meaning or atmosphere of the card - so much potential and energy and explosiveness, but it's very hard to control or direct in any meaningful way. It's an opportunity that must be prepared for in case you don't catch it just right and exert your Will over it just . . . so.

\m/ Kat

Mind you I haven't been keeping up with either this or Nicky's thread and also basically throw out the entire Book of Thoth and read intuitively with my Thoth, I know I should probably run know but stupid question here; Doesn't the Platonic Solids also link or are part of the Sacred Geometry that Lady Harris did as part of her design in the images or is this just crap they tell us to make it sound more interesting? (the Sacred Geometry thing of course)

I don't think it's crap, per se, but also think that the PS's are unrelated to the projective synthetic geometry side of the Thoth deck. Mind you, that's me thinking, which could be dangerous

There's a site that comes up on the first page of search results if you look for "geometry Harris" or something like that, which lays out "harmonious combinations". I think there are also some threads on here.

\m/ Kat