People said
Thoth Tarot Knights acted like
Rider-Waite-Smith Knights on this thread? I'm amazed. When I say something silly I get "probie slapped" like DiNozzo hard - and it's deserved.
Okay, okay...get yourself a diagram of the
Tree of Life and hopefully I won't pull us both into a pit - but it's highly likely. I'm ignorant-ignorant of the
Tree of Life and not adopting a Buddhist "not-knowing" position here. Well fools rush in where angels fear to tread because if the fools don't go who will?
To begin with,
Thoth Tarot reverses the whole
Rider-Waite-Smith scheme. In
Rider-Waite-Smith, a "10" is a matured element that is [normally] a gift that [normally] keeps on giving like
10/Pentacles - Wealth. A great card! In
Thoth Tarot,
10/Pentacles - Wealth is literally the weakest, lowest card in the pack. It's a "10" which means the element has totally degraded (think like radioactive material coming apart) in the lowest of the four worlds (
Assiyah) and in the dead last position (
Malkut or
Malkuth, depending if the last letter is a
Teth or a
Tav, I don't know I've never seen it in Aramaic block script). This is because Qabalah is a Jewish gnostic emanation scheme where [very glib here] "matter is evil, spirit is good."
The earliest trouble for Christianity (Xtny) wasn't "Is Jesus divine?" as was debated in the 18th through present centurues, but rather "How could Jesus be material - ever?" Some gnostic Xns even said, "If Jesus walked across the beach, there would be no foot prints in the sand" (this is called "Docetism" from the Greek
dokeo, "to appear" or "to seem to be." The other one was "adoptionism" - Jesus became "Christ" at the baptism and lost it on the cross, therefore no divine passion) because spirit cannot have emotions or feel pain, let alone die in a crucifixion! The higher emanations are pure spirit and the lower are heavy material. I hope this has been corrected in contemporary gnosticism but I still hear it from time to time in recordings from
Sounds True and read quips about "the evil demiurge who made the universe," but basically bodies and sex and Mother Earth are dirty and bad in the classic formulations. This did get into Xtny and that's why all this celibacy and trouble embracing "sex = good gift from the Divine" until very, very recently - and then those of us who still practice would honestly say it is sadly only the tip of iceberg. So take the good, spit the bad with gnosticism. I'll tell you at the end my problem with this belief structure and also how I embrace it too.
But suffice to say, the early gnostics - Xn and non - went to one of two extremes, emasculation or denial plus other extreme ascetic practices or full license like classic orgies. Both were justified because whatever done in the body was moot, only gnosis (Greek for "knowledge") is important. So if you know the secret handshakes and information, your body morality - and in some cases social too - was irrelevant.
The
Thoth Tarot Knights and
Queens kick the game off in the initial split at
Keter (a.k.a., "the Crown") into the first two emanations, (2)
Hochmah and (3)
Binah. The
Knights in
Hochmah travel to the
Queens in
Binah and then emanate "the children" who will go into matter below the abyss. Now this is "spiritual" to avoid that dirty sex, through Crowley will go there [thankfully] through metaphor and also to drive away the squeemish [plus probably to grandstand too].
So the children, which are the
Princes and the
Princesses descend across the abyss from pure spirit to matter and materialize. Instantly, they're lesser because they've got matter (they've "materialized"), which is dirty. The
Princes probably does more messenger work because he runs through the next 6 stations:
Hesed,
Gevurah (a
Beth without a dagesh gets a "v" not "b" sound),
Tiferet,
Netzach,
Hod, and
Yesod. The are also known as the
Holy Guardian Angels when this Macrocosom is applied to the microcosom of individual humans and the soul becomes the
Princess which ascends the stations to find its way back to God (
Keter). However the
Princess, as
earth elements have something all the others don't - a piece of the
Knight, the
Queen, and the
Prince in them as
earth is seen as a compilation of
fire,
water, and
air all together.
By the way, all these stations or emanations, or
Sefirot (the plural of this feminine noun,
Sefirah) are connected by 22 pathways that form the roads. Guess what else has 22 in it? Yep, the
Major Arcana form the highways for the
Minor Arcana to do their thing.
Lastly in lowly
Malkut/Malkuth sits the
Princesses. They also forms the Thrones for the
Aces of their respective suits. The
Aces actually were the card split in
Keter, so they trump the
Knights (and possibly the
Major Arcana) in importance because they are Plotinus' the
One. There is nothing higher that the
One, and gnosticism sprang from the womb of Plotinus' neo-platonic thought.
If you're thoroughly confused, join the club! Like I said, I really don't much at all...
I shirk from gnosticism for the same reason I dislike Satanism, left-hand paths, and libertarianism in general. I work with homeless populations almost every day of the week and I really, really do
*LOVE* these people. However such persons, if in control, would slash my funding to 25% and I would have to justify this before any service could be given: "Is this person a 'worthy' or an 'unworthy' poor? If the later, let natural selection do its work and butt out." While it may not immediately lead to this, given time these are the natural implications.
When I dialogue with my Republican wife and other Republicans or Libertarians, I have to explain to them in our modern world how charities and/or churches cannot provide the kind of social support persons need today. The churches in our rural county, who we love dearly, say to our little non-profit, secular community action agency, "We look to you to screen people because we have so little money to help." People come in with $2500-$3000 utility shut-off bills in the dead of winter and have 4 children under 12 in the housing unit. Did they run the bill and not pay it? Yes. But what does that say about
us if we let them die? Then later we work with them towards self-sufficiency...
Your elaborate insight on the Thoth Courts has been highly informative, however, so I'm injecting this into my indexed notes. More to ingest tonight, more to absorb. Muito apreciado.