How does Kabbalah fit in with the Tarot....

Rob

venicebard said:
Are you aware that Newton himself -- who despite Einstein is not in the least outdated (well, except of course for his view of light) -- was a seeker of the prisca sapientia, the pristine knowledge of an age before man degenerated to his present state? He found a morsel or two of it, to be sure, and I have since confirmed that even more exists, embedded in Tarot of Marseilles and the Hebrew and Keltic traditions whose partial preservation of earlier science through numerico-alphabetic symbol informed that deck. It was an understanding that corrects modern physics on several counts, one being that quark theory is a bridge too far (the need to go back to the original parton interpretation, where mesons, not 'gluons', were the medium of the strong force), plus demonstrates clear understanding of how atom-types (chemical 'elements') interact in living matter.

I can of course back the above up with detailed argument, detail only depending on others' interest (and my limited ability to 'surf' the net). (Outta time, but will return in a moment.)

I said "doesn't necessarily." What I was arguing here is that the fact that a given piece of knowledge is old doesn't immediately make it correct, since that argument is used entirely too often to back up otherwise unsupportable conclusions. Saying something like "It came from the ancients" simply doesn't mean, support, or especially, prove anything. At the same time, the fact that a piece of knowledge is "modern" doesn't make it correct, either.

I think you missed my point, which was that there is no causal relation between the age of a fact and its correctness...not that ancient knowledge is necessarily wrong or that there can't possibly be very old truth that was lost over millennia. Mere age can't be used as an argument supporting or denying the truthfulness of any fact.

Your theory sounds interesting, mostly because you've indicated that you have detailed argument for it beyond "he found morsels of knowledge from before the degeneration of man," since it would be no less true if discovered (or not lost but already commonly known) now than millennia ago. :) Please post it somewhere! Perhaps in a new thread for discussion?
 

Nevada

Strategeus said:
Please post it somewhere! Perhaps in a new thread for discussion?
Yes, please! I'd love to read that thread -- though I can't promise I'll understand it.

Nevada
 

venicebard

Strategeus said:
With spiritual systems, it's arguable that there's no such thing as correct, there's only the concept of "more sensical" to the student. Metaphysics is just a way to model that which is not yet understood, and until it is understood, no model will be completely accurate.
This makes you a moral relativist, in my book, as I am a platonist who believes that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty all exist as part of the (unalterable) Form Upright Sentience or Adam Qadmon, the 'divine Form' (that which all seeks, the unmoved Mover).
In the real world, revision guards the path from ignorance to wisdom. Unless you're willing to open your mind to new ideas and revisions of old ideas, you're perpetually stuck with antiquated knowledge and an unwarrantedly inflated ego. Wake up.
Well, you are speaking of man's grasp of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, which in all our cases is of course incomplete (we being mortal). But when such things as Euclid are 'revised', one ends up with less truth, not more.
Strategeus said:
I said "doesn't necessarily."
Point taken.
Your theory sounds interesting, mostly because you've indicated that you have detailed argument for it beyond "he found morsels of knowledge from before the degeneration of man," since it would be no less true if discovered (or not lost but already commonly known) now than millennia ago. :) Please post it somewhere! Perhaps in a new thread for discussion?
As for Newton, I just meant that he discovered the principle uniting gravitational phenomena, which is part of the pristine knowledge (in my view, anyway).

As for my own contribution to its 'excavation' . . .
Nevada said:
Yes, please! I'd love to read that thread -- though I can't promise I'll understand it.
. . . consider the following thread: the last message here (page 6)

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=9715&page=6&pp=10

and the first two on the following page (page 6). I hope I've referenced it correctly (it's a thread about the Holy Grail).
 

Nevada

Thanks so much for the links, venicebard and cardlady22. Now I have my evening's reading planned out -- if the cat doesn't distract me too much.

Nevada
 

Greg Stanton

http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Bardic_origin_of_Tarot

This article is certainly interesting, but it is about 99% speculation, and no references are cited -- more of a personal view of the origin of the Tarot rather than a presentation of actual evidence.

Good reading though.
 

Nevada

Greg Stanton said:
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Bardic_origin_of_Tarot

This article is certainly interesting, but it is about 99% speculation, and no references are cited -- more of a personal view of the origin of the Tarot rather than a presentation of actual evidence.

Good reading though.
I feel about the same way. It was interesting reading, venicebard, and you may very well be onto something. But I also think maybe you're trying to connect too many dots too directly to Tarot, and that some of those dots may be just specks of dust. At least for me.

While I think it's great to be able to connect things to Tarot that help us understand it, and I understand many people are more interested in its history than I am, and while I believe as I said before that everything in the Universe is interconnected, interdependent, I don't think it's necessary for any one person, or even humanity as a whole, to attempt to connect everything to everything on an intellectual level. For one thing, we can't -- there are breaks in the evidence that we aren't going to reconstruct no matter what, without some guesswork or fudging and stretching to make things fit. I like to explore ideas, though, so I'm always open to new ideas -- as far as I can follow them or feel I need to.

I personally think the different writing systems you're connecting were arrived at independently. Especially the Ogham -- which I speculate came about as a means of counting by making notches on sticks, and only later evolved into a means of writing words. It's not pictographic as the ancient Hebrew and the Runic alphabets appear to be. And it makes sense to me that if it started as notches on sticks it would also relate to trees in a nature based society.

Anyway, thanks for the links. I did like the connection of Kabbalah to the Merkabah -- and it's very interesting that last night I also happened to see a Nova documentary on PBS about recent archaeological discoveries surrounding the possible origins of the Old Testament. So there was some synchronicitiy in reading that as well. In the documentary they mentioned the repeated theme of exile and return in the Bible as well as in the history of the Jewish people, and that stood out for me as a distinct connection to Kabbalah, as well as to our spiritual journey as I understand it.

Nevada
 

DimSum

The problem with the Golden Dawn Kabbalah correspondences (of assigning which Hebrew letter, goes with which of the 22 paths on the Tree) is they are flat out wrong and inaccurate. It doesn't take much digging in a primary source (such as the Sepher Yetzirah, or the Bahir) to find clear details on which letters are assigned to the horizontal paths of the Tree, which to the vertical paths, and which to the diagonal paths. A person can find this in English-language texts without knowing Hebrew, although it does help to know the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which you can get easily off the Internet.

I use both the Tarot and the Kabbalah, but made no progress whatsoever until I got accurate information to work with, for me that meant correcting two big "errors" that are floating around out there, the one named above, and the other where to place the Fool card in terms of assigning it to one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Once you begin working with the material and interacting with the living energies of the 22 Hebrew letters it becomes really clear that older versions of Tarot that put Fool at 21 make a whole lot more sense.

Don't take my word for it, don't take any book's word for it. Work with the energies of the Hebrew letters, talk to them, invite them to share their wisdom with you. Use your own intuition, and receive information directly from the source, that's where the growth comes for us as individuals, and that's how our readings come to life.
 

Umbrae

I'm with DimSum.