Zephyros
Tarot and the formula of the Tetragrammaton
THE TAROT AND THE FORMULA OF TETRAGRAMMATON הוהי What, then, are the Court Cards? This question involves another aspect of the system of development. What was the first mental process? Obliged to describe Nothing, the only way to do so without destroying its integrity was to represent it as the union of a Plus Something with an equivalent Minus Something. One may call these two ideas, the Active and Passive, the Father and Mother. But although the Father and Mother can make a perfect union, thereby returning to Zero, which is a retrogression, they can also go forward into Matter, so that their union produces a Son and a Daughter. The idea works out in practice as a method of describing how the union of any two things produces a third thing which is neither of them.
The simplest illustration is in Chemistry. If we take hydrogen gas and chlorine gas, and pass an electric spark through them, an explosion takes place, and hydrochloric acid is produced. Here we have a positive substance, which may be called the Son of the marriage of these elements, and is an advance into Matter. But also, in the ecstasy of the union, Light and Heat are disengaged; these phenomena are not material in the same sense as the hydrochloric acid is material; this product of the union is therefore of a spiritual nature, and corresponds to the Daughter.
In the language of the alchemists, these phenomena were classified for convenience under the figure of four “elements”.
Fire, the purest and most active, corresponds to the Father Water, still pure but passive, is the Mother their union results in an element partaking of both natures, yet distinct from either, and this they called Air
One must constantly remember that the terms used by ancient and medieval philosophers do not mean at all what they mean nowadays. “Water” does not mean to them the chemical compound H20; it is an intensely abstract idea, and exists everywhere. The ductability of iron is a watery quality. [Its magnetic virtue (similarly) is fiery, its conductivity airy, and its weight and hardness earthy. Yet, weight is but a function of the curvature of the “space-time Continuum” [“Earth is the Throne of Spirit.”] The word “element” does not mean a chemical element; it means a set of ideas; it summarizes certain qualities or properties.
It seems hardly possible to define these terms in such a way as to make their meaning clear to the student. He must discover for himself by constant practice what they mean to him. It does not even follow that he will arrive at the same ideas. This will not mean ~ that one mind is right and the other wrong, because each one of us has his own universe all to himself, and it is not the same as anybody else’s universe. The moon that A. sees is not the moon that B., standing by him, sees. In this case, the difference is so infinitesimal that it does not exist in practice; yet there is a difference. But if A. and B look at a picture in a gallery, it is very much not the same picture to both, because A’s mind has been trained to observe it by his experience of thousands of other pictures; B. has probably seen an entirely different set of pictures. Their experience will coincide only in the matter of a few well-known pictures. Besides this, their minds are essentially different in many other ways. So, if A. dislikes Van Gogh, B. pities him; if C. admires Bougereau, D. shrugs his shoulders. There is no right or wrong about any matter whatsoever.
This is true, even in matters of the strictest science. The scientific description of an object is universally true; and yet it is not completely true for any single observer. The phenomenon called the Daughter is ambiguous. It has been explained above as the spiritual ingredient in the result of the marriage of the Father and the Mother; but this is only one interpretation.