Crown Jewels
similia said:
Could you please refer us to the place where Crowley attributes the Aeon card to Air? I can't recall any GD based deck, including Crowley as referencing anything but "Judgment=Shin = Fire" Given that the Aeon card is a depiction of the Stele of Revealing, the symbol of the dawn of Crowley's New Aeon in which the old world is destroyed by fire, the attribution of Air is unintelligable to me.
The alchemical symbol for Air is on the 20:AEON card itself. Down at the bottom next to the title.
You can see all four alchemical glyphs for the elements on 4 DISKS : Power
Air : upper right turret
Water : upper left turret
Fire : lower left turret
Earth : lower right turret
These are not my elemental attributions, but are established symbols of the corpus hermeticum. I don't know the edition of the deck in my possession, but I expect it is the same as any readily available from any mainstream commercial portal dealing in divination tools.
The element of Earth has no corresponding Trump as it is the element of our foundation, Malkuth (The Kingdom), where every monarch reigns supreme once Crowned.
In The Book of Thoth (1st Weiser paperback edition, 12th printing 1986), Crowley's description of 20:AEON (pgs.115-116) addresses the old card, "called The Angel: or, The Last Judgement" - a messenger blowing a trumpet beneath whom 3 dead rise from their graves, "The central one had his hands raised with right angles at the elbows and shoulders, so as to form the letter Shin, which refers to Fire." He kept the attribution for his design, placing the letter at the feet of "Hru, who is the great angel set over the Tarot."
This unfinished glyph is not a printer's error, but is rather part of a tradition amongst alchemists to always leave out a simple piece of their diagrams that any Initiate would know how to correct. Crowley left a few. But like this one they serve a specific function.
The genius of the other flaws, however, only makes sense when you know how to organize the Tarot into its 9 Constellations and then deduce what sequence they fit in.
Apples Anyone?
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=108025