nicky said:
And for the record I think Crowley was misdirecting us when he made Emperor/Tzaddi and The Star/Heh ... so I am disregarding that.
I've been trying to work through that whole "Tzaddi is not the Star" thing. My understanding is that there are two rationales for the Emperor/Tzaddi and Star/Heh switch.
One is that Crowley argues that the significance of Tzaddi is a better match for the Emperor and the significance of Heh is a better match for The Star. Crowley connects Tzaddi with the roots TZ or TS which he states "is derived from Sanskrit roots meaning Head and Age, and is found today in words like Caesar, Tsar, Sirdar, Senate, Senior, Signor, Senor, Seigneur." In this way, Crowley connects Tzaddi with the concept of male authority.
Heh, on the other hand, is connected through the Tetragrammaton, Yod Heh Vau Heh, to Binah, the supernal mother (first Heh), and Malkuth, the daughter (second Heh). Heh, therefore, is presumably a better match for the feminine energy of The Star.
The second rationale apparently has to do with the whole 8 Justice/11 Strength or 8 Strength/11 Justice controversy. I was surprised to find this out. Crowley diagrams this in the Book of Thoth, but when I looked at this previously, my eyes would glaze over and I would quickly skip through it. I finally worked through it with the help of DuQuette.
The GD switched the positions of trumps Justice and Strength so that Strength would align with Leo and Justice with Libra, while maintaining the natural sequence of the zodiac. Crowley didn't like that, so he restored the original order of the trumps (Adjustment/8 and Lust/11) in his deck. But he kept the GD attribution of Libra for Adjustment (Justice) and Leo for Lust (Strength), which throws off the normal sequence of zodiac signs. Switching the positions of Tzaddi (now associated with Leo) and Heh (now associated with Aquarius) sort of creates another imbalance on the other end of the zodiac that precisely mirrors the imbalance created by switching Leo and Libra, at least keeping things symmetrical.
I don't think that Crowley switched Tzaddi and Heh as a blind. I think he was just trying to get things to fit together that just don't quite fit together naturally. However, the plot thickens. The assignment of Tzaddi to The Emperor changes the position of the Emperor to a different path on the Tree of Life. Duquette points out that Crowley's explanation for the light shining down from the upper right corner of The Emperor assumes that The Emperor is inhabiting it's previous path, now inhabited by The Star. Oops! So who knows what the real story is. I just know that if I had named this thread, I would have named it "Gonna learn Thoth even if it drives me mad." After struggling with stuff like this, I'm well on my way to the madhouse.
Alan
