My take
Look, guys and gals, I’ll preach only in brackets here and mostly speculate aloud in kindred spirit, because assigning doubles to planets is an intriguing problem I’ve not solved yet either (note unspoken assumption). I’ll concentrate on the letters themselves, only mentioning trumps in brackets if crucial (since I match them differently).
[First, a quick sermon (which the faint-of-heart may skip). It seems to me distance is a crude way to order planets when the suit of rounds shows us cycles, not balls. There is a very clear-cut order that was the one used in the deepest strata of tradition, and on the surface as well (just look at rulership): by length of cycle... though the sun or gold has a secret aspect to it that can only be deduced, in that ‘secretly’ it is the great or platonic year (of roughly 26,000 yrs.), since this is the relationship between year/ecliptic and day/equator. The year itself is an aspect of the layer assigned to water (the inner planets, earth’s orbit being one) and day the one cycle assigned earth (earth’s crust itself). It is the perambulation of equator and ecliptic in relation to one another that is the province of gold and the sun... which is not a star. Exoterically (and to the poor, groping astronomers) it is fiery, sort of ‘star writ large’. But to the wise, it is of air, specifically that aspect of air that receives and focuses fire’s light. This is of course the ‘proto-Hermetic’ view, not the ‘modern’ one... yet I, not unversed in physics and astronomy, value scientists’ contributions of empirical data and quantum mechanics immensely, mostly because they corroborate the proto-Hermetic model and contradict the very theories they purport to solidify (a source of chuckles). Modern plasma cosmology, for instance, though a minority view, far outpaces (Einsteinian) gravitational cosmology in both empirical fit and plausibility, and this rightly places fire where the sages place it, at the limit of the heavens (the very-large), to match the fact that it is also at the heart of matter (the very-small), since all is energy: earth, me compadres, is ‘middle ground’ (middan-yeard in Old English), the node of relative calmness between two great turbulences stemming from two great fires, the MAJestic and the minUTE.]
To begin, Graves assigns letters to planets, but not all are doubles (he was not a Cabalist). His choices teach yet fail to solve the problem in Hebrew we have posed for ourselves, to which we do not yet know there be an answer. His (with my Hebrew equivalencies) are:
F-alder-feh-sofit – Saturn
S-willow-shin – luna
H-hawthorn-chet – sol
D-oak-dalet – Jupiter
T-holly-tav – Mars
K-hazel-kaf – Mercury
Kk-apple-qof – Venus
...this progressing from aries to virgo (repeating virgo) as does the string of uninterrupted simples in the alef-bet (as SY places them). H replaced B-birch-bet as sol, to represent sol on the outer or spring-summer half of the round where the rest are (evidence pointing to a religious taboo at one stage requiring H’s replacement by B, and F’s by T). Now this comes close to a solution, based on symbolic affinity:
bet – sol
feh-sofit (peh) – Saturn
dalet – Jupiter
tav – Mars
kaf – Mercury
...(leaving gimel and resh for luna and Venus), which fails to satisfy, being incomplete. So let us try a different tack.
The doubles are stops. Now qof and tet are also stops in Hebrew, but tet is theta in Greek, not a stop, and qof translated into Indo-European gives us the Latin interrogative letter Q which becomes w in German (its rune), hw in Old English, and wh in English. So the doubles mark the fixed stops, R a rolled stop, guttural R at base-of-the-tongue libra, R rolled on tip of tongue at R's 13-month-calendar position [both are on the Cauldron of seven doubles]. The phonetic relations are:
P - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B
- - T - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - D - -
- - - - - - - K - - - - - - - - - - - - - - G - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
...the bowl being the mouth.
The problem I have is that the zodiac was conceived as a circle that just fit into this bowl height-wise, related to it via the sweep of the bowl’s radius through it [a process related to the very generation of planetary rulership]. The dynamics of this process suggest: B as Mars [it is bardic 5]; D on its calendar-swing to the unvoiced side (to trade places with P) [thought distracted from self-knowledge by nature and the senses] activates Mercury; G establishes the [inert] floor of Jupiter’s column; K helps affix luna to its column; and R and P both help affix Venus to her column... but the latter is pulled away and so might be re-assignable, which would leave T and P and the planets sol and Saturn: since T’s physiological station is the heart (and old Semitic tav a crossroads), it would be sol, making P Saturn (to carry things out to their logical conclusion). In terms of order of generation in the alef-bet, this method yields:
bet – Mars (5)
gimel – Jupiter (4)
dalet – Mercury (8)
kaf – luna (9)
peh – Saturn (3)
resh – Venus (7)
tav – sol (2)
...[the numbers the planetary cycles in Coins or rounds]. Now this is not very satisfying, since dalet’s determination of Mercury’s column is acting as Jupiter, whose messenger Mercury is: dalet is the oaken door (in all traditions practically), and oak is lightning’s (Zeus’s, Thor’s, Thursday’s) tree.
I will end this probing reconnaissance-ala-post with where I am in these contemplations. Tav can be Mars or sol, perhaps more likely the latter since its number is 11, which adds to 2. Dalet is most likely Jupiter and indeed is 4 in Hebrew [with which its bardic number, 12, agrees in valence]. Bet could be Mars (by number) or sol (less likely): it is motherhood, Mars’s greatest manifestation being a mother defending her young. Peh could be Saturn, since Bran, the Keltic Saturn, was poet Taliesin’s (Gwion’s) ‘lord’ and P represents poetic mysteries, being mouth-in-speaking in square-Hebrew and ear-listening in old Semitic, or else Venus [being numbered 7], or else Mercury [being Hebrew 80 and related to the power of speech]. Resh could be sol (being the initial of Ra) or Venus [as the body-mind amongst the doubles] or Saturn [as the greater maleficio, XV LeDiable]. Kaf could be luna or Mercury. And gimel could be Saturn (it being 3 in Hebrew [and related to Saturn’s column via the mechanism outlined in the four central runes of the futhark’s middle aett]), or it could be Mars perhaps [being the desire-mind and Cauldron’s scorpio], or sol, since it divides into ‘year,harvest’ and ‘gift’ in runic – year and day (as in birthday), so to speak: Saturn most likely. So my best guess so far is:
bet – Mars
gimel – Saturn
dalet – Jupiter
kaf – luna
peh – Mercury
resh – Venus
tav – sol
...which unfortunately doesn’t make much sense in alef-bet order and is thus most likely of little use here. Oh well, I tried.
[Let’s try one more thing. Suppose the Cauldron’s signs were just regular signs, in which case they would be ruled by:
bet – Saturn
gimel – Mars
dalet – luna
kaf – Mercury
peh – Jupiter (the Slavic thunder-god being Perkunis)
resh – Venus
tav – sol
... which could of course be modified by returning D and P to their original stations, yielding:
bet – Saturn
gimel – Mars
dalet – Jupiter
kaf – Mercury
peh – luna
resh – Venus
tav – sol
...which has the advantage of putting the poetic mysteries under tutelage of the moon and yet still fails to ‘explain’ alef-bet order.]
I’ve not yet begun seriously to tackle the problem of reasoning-behind-exaltations, which (I’m sure you can’t wait) I’ll find time for soon [but first I have to prepare an important post I promised another, concerning where Zohar crosses paths with bardic revelations]. Who knows, perhaps this will shed some new light on the subject.
Feedback welcome yet non-mandatory.