jmd said:
It is strange how we see things differently - here is a seeker in the dark who seeks the allegory of the secrets of nature, never seeing her, but merely following the imprints left in the sands of time, mere shadows of the truth that produce them, illumined but darkly by the poor light of his mind, rather than by the brightness of the Sun.
This must be how the serious alchemist saw himself in times when the tools of science were yet so primitive. Another way of putting it might be that he seeks Sophia (wisdom) by her footprints in nature: from this perspective, wisdom could be described as 'the science of the possible', of which nature (aka logic, or progression) is the ultimate arbiter.
I think of the entire sequence of trumps as an exposition of alchemy of course, the deck as a whole being a model of the universe of the alchemist. For the 'bardo-Kabbalistic' (i.e. Qabbalistic) structure of number-letter-sign ultimately yields the columns of the planetary metals in the alchemical vessel,
from which (as opposed to vice versa) the planetary rulership of signs (in astrology, one branch of the Hermetic tree) derives. Indeed in the fundamental polarity of this scheme --
9, or
-1 valence but 0 numerically, versus
10, or
0 valence but +1 numerically -- VIIII L'Hermite is on the side of nature (9 months of human gestation to produce a
body), and X LaRoue deFortune is on the side of inner reality (10 digits of human intervention
in nature). So the former
is pursuing the secrets of nature ultimately, whilst the latter encapsulates the message that one is
oneself the ultimate cause of one's fortunes.
[It is this polarity that is expressed in
action (i.e. the Great Name yod-heh-vav-heh, which governs the pattern of action) in the polarity yod-vav, or
19 (+1
both in valence and numerically) versus
17 (-1
both numerically and in valence). These are their bardic numeration, of course, not the derivative (hence later) Greco-Hebrew numeration most are familiar with, where yod reverts to the 10 it expresses and vav becomes 6, the directions of space (since -1
represents the space left
for 1, both numerically and valencewise).
]
[Lest one object that valence was not generally known back then, I have elsewhere on this site explained how the structure
certainly of the first 21 atom-types can easily be deduced from the tension between numerological structure (1, 2, 3, 4, -4, -3, -2, -1, -0, 1 again, etc.) and the situation created by the Fall, wherein duality (2) rebels against unity (1) thus pulling against or subtracting itself
from 1 rather than adding itself
to 1 valencewise (meaning in the way it
acts, improper action being what precipitates the Fall): this makes 2-helium inert (0) and crunches +4 and -4 together in both 6-carbon and 14-silicon, thus establishing the pattern of the periodic table.
]