The Magician and The Fool &c.

[Nocturnal Lure]

Meaning is meaningless

Fascinating...

Still, I feel that over-anylizing theories on concepts that in actuallity have little steady ground to begin with, astroligy is not nescessarilly the heart of tarot to be a blockade for the intuïtive nature of the Tarot.

22 Concepts (not counting minors to keep things short) are in front of you. 22 Concepts are there to be interpreted based on various different aspects. I understand that it can be very helpfull in completely incorporating a card in your "system" to try to absorb every shred of knowledge you can fnd, but in the end I feel the cards are given a bigger meaning, but are also more limited to the framework you tie them to.

Referances and paralels to various concepts like Kabballah, Astroligy and even Christian mytholigy are intruiging and most likely not coïncedental, but I like to think of Tarot as a unique and single entity, a tool to translate your own intuïtion.

As far as ones and zeroes are concerned...

Mathematically 0 has no vallue, it is there to have a reference for other vallues. Still in Tarot, having no vallue has gotten it's own vallue, and o it has detached itself from the mathematicall zero. The first card you come across, the lowest number, vallue, direction is the fool...

When you have and use a blanco card, that is the one that has no vallue and should therefore be considered the true 0, but the fool by any means HAS a vallue.

BTW, a small tip... writing a piece on a forum, asuming a certain amount of knowledge that is not common, could do with a better explanation and introduction... this way it feels very much like boasting your knowledge and dubbed un-interesting. Because of that people might actually miss out on some very interesting concepts.

 

[Fulgour]

Hello Nocturnal Lure! You make many excellent
observations, and for my part I apologise for being
a bit long-winded trying to get things down here.

My feeling is though that I spent many hard hours
reading books that went into great detail about the
attributions for the Majors, but they were all about
one system, created for magickal kabbalah, using
zero=one in order to do what? Create a gollum...?

Tarot should be fun, and you are right that it is
personal ~ and for myself I can now intuitively
see my own way, and not stumble in another.

Check out this very enjoyable little clue from
the ancient Tarots ~ this makes me smile!

XXI Le Monde shows the 3 elemental eaxaltations:
Click on to View:
The Three Haloes on The World

I used to wonder about that particular detail...
why only 3 of them had haloes? But then saw
that tho' the Bull (Taurus) doesn't, clearly the
Lion Eagle and Angel (Leo Scorpio Aquarius)
do have them, and this is on many old decks.

Leo is Fire (Shin appears as an exaltation: Halo)
Scorpio is Water (Mem appears as an exaltation: Halo)
Aquarius is Air (Aleph appears as an exaltation: Halo)

But because The High Priestess is the Moon,
and the Moon really is exalted in Taurus...
well then the Bull doesn't need the little clue.

*

As for Aleph Mem Shin, we would see them as
being a unified trinity, which can be found in:

The Magician (active-action) Aleph
Death (passive-reaction) Mem
The World (active-completion) Shin

And wouldn't it be odd to find The Fool being
part of that trinity instead of XXI The World?

 

[Fulgour]

I would sure love to know...

I prefer it as 21/shin.

Hello Umbrae! Yesterday, as on many days hence,
I went searching through my little Tarot library looking
for a clear explanation of why The Fool (0~22?) would
be given Letter 21 Shin (other than the biting creature)
and couldn't find anything specific. Oswald Wirth isn't
even very interested~ and Papus says almost nothing.

I'm sort of going with the "Persian Flaw" idea that the
old-timers made that 'mistake' on purpose, in humility.

 

[Umbrae]

...looking for a clear explanation of why The Fool (0~22?) would be given Letter 21 Shin (other than the biting creature) and couldn't find anything specific.

Well yeah, I've found nothing either - other than the 'tradition' of placing the Fool in after XX, and the corrilations between Trickster/Tooth.

Further, every other card meaning 'fits' when Aleph = 1.

 

[Fulgour]

Song of Tav

Plant in me the seeds
of your teachings
that I might return to
You in truth

Click on to view: Artistic rendition of TAV letter 22

"Two crossed sticks like an “x” or a “t” are the original forms of the letter tav. Over time one stick got longer and then curved to become the letter tav we know today. The crossing of two sticks or lines signifies completion. The letter tav completes the aleph-beit. Tav means a sign, mark or symbol. The illustration I have designed has a butterfly in it. The structure of the butterfly resembles the “x” that the letter tav derives from. The butterfly is a sign of teshuva, the Hebrew word for return."

Art & Text by Avigayil Landsman

*

Click on to view: The (unnumbered) Fool ~ Le Mat

Do you see any similarities...?

 

[Fulgour]

Why "Shin" Fool?

Well yeah, I've found nothing either - other than the 'tradition' of placing the Fool in after XX, and the corrilations between Trickster/Tooth.

JMD once related how his grandfather explained this.
I think it was just "done" and that was all there was.

If placing The Fool as Shin between XX and XXI has
any deeper significance, history remains silent on it!

 

[numbers]

I've thought that the Fool was Shin ever since I had an opinion on the subject.
My reasons:
1) If the Fool is Shin, the three mother letters correspond to the Fool, the Magician and Death. Otherwise, they correspond to The Fool, the Hanged Man and Judgment Day. The first makes more sense to me. The Fool appears to be a rustic, as pagans must have whenever the Marseille deck was designed, but he undergoes transformation (usual interpretation of Death card) to become the Magician he really is. This makes sense to me as a fundamental set of three letters. Fool/Hanged Man/ Judgment Day as a fundamental set does not. Also, the Magician is #1, the Fool has no number, and the Death card has no name in the Marseille. I take that as a clue.
2) The Marseille style makes it pretty clear that whoever designed it thought the Magician was Aleph. You can find pictures of Hebrew letters in about half the cards, but not with the Fool = Aleph.
3) Well, of course, the Golden Dawn figured that the Marseille tradition got it wrong. To follow the Golden Dawn tradition, either follow Waite, who allegedly intentionally put mistakes into his deck so as not to reveal the hidden tradition, or Crowley, who is so naturally obscure that he didn't have to, or ... create your own purified Golden-Dawn-style tradition.
4) Papus's *Tarot of the Bohemians* has a sensible looking system based on Fool=Shin. I've read that there are dreadful mathematical flaws in Papus, but I haven't found them yet.
5) Besides, in probability, algebraic geometry, theory of p-adic numbers, and lots of other mathematical topics that I barely know anything about, zero and one are *opposites*, almost like zero and infinity in more mundane types of math. Confusing the two by making the Fool=Aleph looks quite messy.
Of course, I could be wrong about all this, but those are my ideas at the moment.

Regards,
"Numbers"

 

[Sophie]

The Fool as shin

I've been looking in my Wirth and Levi. I think the answer is to be found in XXI-The World. The occultists associated tav with The World because (to quote Wirth): "The 21st letter of the Hebrew alphabet is shin, not tav; but it is the latter that fits best the Arcanum numbered XXI, because it corresponds to the All, complete and achieved, the natural conclusion of the seven triads and the three heptads of the Tarot. The primitive tav is a vertical + or oblique x cross."

Levi calls tav: "the summary of all in all", and sees in the World dancer the Truth, the completion of all mysteries. He calls shin "the sensitive, the flesh, the eternal life", and associates it to The Fool. If we see the Fool as the eternally wandering outcast, human and non-human at the same time, then shin might well fit him. Its original meaning of tooth fits the teethy animal (Levi sees a tiger!) that is biting the Fool.

The letter shin is considered very holy. It symbolises the holy spirit when placed on the mezuza by the door of Jewish houses. That would make it fit XXI-The World best - except if we consider the Fool to be the holy spirit in disguise, in the way of old tales, when the gods would come visiting dressed as a beggar.

Wirth sees in the Fool all excess and no intellect or morals. He is outside the pale - and outside the bounds formed by Aleph and Tav. "His rank is twenty-second, but his numerical value is zero because the Fool is a character that does not count, given his intellectual and moral inexistence." But that does not explain why shin, which belongs between aleph and tav, should be considered out of bounds . Perhaps the Fool, being a loose beggar, the primordial nothing, needs a mother, and therefore a mother letter?

For my part, I can see arguments for both attributions. Fool as Tav makes of the "primordial nothing" the primordial everything, and the Fool's place at the end becomes an eternal cycle, or spiral. But the Fool as shin links him to the other mother letters, at the beginning and in the middle, and to my mind, fits his movable position both outside and between the other arcana - as well as the reasons I gave above (the holy fool, the eternal wanderer, etc.)

 

[Rosanne]

Excuse me while I make a Tower sound (gag gag)- that is the sound called a pharyngeal fricative. Are we all agreed that The Tower is card 16? The Phoenician Abjad has Ayin the eye as its 16th letter. It then follows that letter 21 is shin and the 21st Card is the World. That leaves one letter left over. A floater. A wandering mark looking for a home- Taw/tav. Who should we give this floater to? Move everything and give it to the World? Why? Tarot is about Man, not about the World. The World can do without us, we can not do without the World. If Aleph is the Ox and the Fool, then the Magician becomes the Beit/beth the Temple and so forth. So go on, give Taw/Tav to the Fool -its his signature after all- before he gets an education. ~Rosanne

 

[Sophie]

But you see, Rosanne, I don't see Tav as a floater at all. It is a completion, a finale, a totality. Or maybe - if I can be persuaded that it floats - then it fits the floating dancer in her mandorla???

MMm, well, I am beginning to persuade myself Fool is shin. And I really hadn't meant to!