venicebard
Of course it can be applied to anything, but not in the way you mean. It is the explanation for everything, but not in its twisted and decayed modern form: one has to dig a little (actually, a lot).Greg Stanton said:Interesting post, Venicebird.
I think that your explanation is more an indication that the Qabalistic concepts can be applied to literally anything, rather than proof that TdM was designed to correspond to Qabalistic philosophy.
This is a common error: it was 'introduced', that is, it sprang up in Provence-Languedoc (Isaac the Blind lived near Narbonne) and shifted to Spain in response to the Albigensian Crusade no doubt, which decimated the tolerant culture of the Midi early in the 13th century.Firstly, the Qabalah was known only by an elite few when it was introduced to Europe in the 12th century, in Spain.
My view is that since the knowledge it represented had to go underground after reimposition of Church rule in the Midi (Provence-Languedoc) it would have been natural for it to have been camouflaged as a game: how else could it have been expressed?Secondly, it's doubtful that a card GAME would have utilized complex, esoteric religious concepts in its design.
As to this last point, of course the images are those of medieval Xian Europe, as that is where it flourished. And I have said all along that my own view is that it was not the product of Jews but of Gnostics -- not the heavily dualistic Gnostics, such as the Cathars, but simple bardic Gnostics, that is, adherents of the earlier Keltic form of Xianity that underlay the bardic corpus of the British Isles, which was brought to the Continent no doubt along with the 'Matter of Britain', that is, the Arthurian cycle, in the 12th century.And third, the trumps are covered with symbols common in mediaeval Christian Europe -- not what you would expect if these images were derived from Jewish philosophy.
It is clear, for instance, that V LePape does not have the strong negative connotations it would have for Cathars (though not perhaps for all Jews, since one actually tried to convert him!) but rather simply connotes blessing: his hand is raised in blessing, as befits its number, that of the fingers of the hand and of the Keltic tree-letter beth or birch, whose meaning is blessing, namely the blessing (and counting of fingers on each hand) associated with the new-born, since birch is the first consonant and represents the birth of the spirit of the year. Indeed the card shows two children being blessed by him (and their mother's or nanny's arm entering the card from the side, as fits our letter B [from Greek] showing a pregnant torso in profile). Indeed birch besoms are used to switch evil spirits out of children, another form of 'blessing'.
I reject tarot's being a product of 'Christian Cabala', since this was an offshoot and not part of the main current of tradition. But the Qabbalah itself can only (I have surmised from a wealth of evidence) have sprung up in the first place from the meeting of Judaic and Keltic lore surrounding the alphabet and the ten primary principles (Sefirot), since much had been lost from decay in both traditions (as is also true today) and they needed each other to restore the greater original system of understanding, whose profundity can be gleaned from its resonance in the realm of physics, chemistry, and many other fields moderns are mere gropers around in: Qabbalah, properly understood, corrects modern science and thought in many ways, refuting both creationism and neo-Darwinism with its doctrine of Adam Qadmon (the Platonic-hence-eternal Form Upright Sentience, prior to division into male and female) and showing the exact counterpart in physics of the four alchemical elements by their charge and spin . . . and so on.
This means that the tarot (TdM clearly being the original) must have arisen from a Keltic strand of tradition that went underground at the time of the Albigensian Crusade but that had been instrumental in the reconstruction of the original pristine gnosis both the Judaic and Keltic trads were descended from, which within Judaism became the Kabbalah (Qabbalah's shredded remnants) but must have left its Keltic counterpart in Provence that led to Tarot of Marseilles.
I am not sure I buy this, though it has become dogma to tarot scholars. If it did, which is certainly possible, then there would have been an ironic twist in that 12 is the number medieval bards associated with D or duir, the oak (dalet in Hebrew means 'door', of which oak is the proper wood), tree of the 'king of the waxing year', who represented the heroic, that is, self-sacrifice. Indeed the deeper meaning, as I see it, is the inverted image on the back of the eye (which would explain his lack of concern at being upside down and the obvious fact that he is dancing a jig!), since oak is lightning's tree (and D's station on the Cauldron of the surroundings, from horizon within to horizon without, is the horizon without, to which we are connected by sight).What the cards represented to the European mind at the time of their inception is very different than how we view the cards now. For example, X The Hanged Man, was a depiction of a traitor -- who along with other criminals were commonly punished in this way.
. . . because the tradition whence tarot arose has been lost, pure and simple: I have had to painstakingly -- and against the current of all hereabouts (though the bulk of the work was done long before I ever went online) -- reconstruct it from fragments, by melding Keltic and Judaic currents just as they would have had to have done in the 12th century.We see the card differently now because . . .
As for 19th- and early 20th-century speculations, I take them all with a grain of salt (Crowley, for instance, judging from his 777, didn't even know dalet corresponded to oak!), except in that they did notice the formal correspondence between 22 trumps and 22 letters, between 10 pips in 4 suits and 10 Sefirot in 4 worlds, and between 4 court cards in 4 suits and the 4-letter Name resounding through the 4 worlds. Yet even in this last they were misled by the incomplete Judaic tradition surrounding the Name into changing them from 3 males and 1 female to 2 of each. (The actual import of the court cards is almost certainly yod=King, heh=Knight, vav=Queen, and heh=Knave, since in the original distribution of simples about the round, samekh-tzaddi-cheyt-vav-ayin-qof-teyt-heh-zayin-yod-lamedh-nun [whose correctness can be solidly shown, but by somewhat lengthy argument], only vav, which in old Semitic showed a breast pouring forth milk, occurs on the female or outer side of the round; the outer side [spring and summer] is that of the female because it is the female who carries the outer or physical body to term, and because it is the front [outer side] pillar [Boaz] that is broken off at the sternum to allow for the swelling of the womb.)
I'll shut up now . . . or not.
First of all, such books are never available (except to the rich). Second of all, so what if (incorrect, as I see it) 'Qabalistic and astrological meanings were grafted onto' them: do the mistakes of others forever close off the path towards truth, or do we find that path on our own?Reading more scholarly books about Tarot history (I recommend Dummet and Huson), it becomes quite apparent that Qabalistic and astrological meanings were grafted onto the (French, TdM) cards in the 19th century.