kwaw wrote:
Indeed, one of the meanings of Teth is staff/rod.
This is actually a misconception;
teth has no literal meaning in the Hebrew language (it is the one letter whose name has no meaning).
Several of the meanings we Tarotists associate with the 22 letter names are completely erroneous, such as
he meaning "window" (which it does not),
chet meaning "field" (which it does not),
teth meaning "rod" or "snake" (which it does not),
lamed meaning "ox-goad" (which it does not), and
tzaddi meaning "fish-hook" (which it does not). These errors appear to have originated in the works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century linguists (Court de Gebelin is included in this lot!) and were then taken up and promulgated by early occult Tarotists. The same errors are repeated in Tarot books being published today.
This oft-repeated list of meanings is also significantly incomplete, as many of the Hebrew letter names had more than one literal meaning at the time in which the Tarot appeared. A full list of these corrections and meanings can be found here:
http://www.spiritone.com/~filipas/Masquerade/Essays/epsilon.html
It is time that we be collectively insistent on these facts, especially since it turns out that the letter meanings actually do correspond to many of the trump designs and may therefore bear a relevance to Tarot's origin.
kwaw wrote:
The one to one correspondence depends on the placement of the fool.
Attempts to determine the unnumbered card's "placement" within the series is a moot issue since there either
are a body of demonstrable letter correspondences or there
are not.
Frankly, occultists have placed far too much attention on this single card, all in an effort to justify sets of alphabetic correspondences having little arguable basis to begin with. It must be born in mind, though, that
one reason no one--including Levi, Papus, Mathers, Crowley, even Dummett and modern researchers--has been able to argue demonstrable correspondences is because we have all assumed the often-published letter meanings to be accurate. Not only are they inaccurate but they have mislead even card historians from investigating the evidence seriously.
Within the context of historical research, it is now evident that there does exist a demonstrable correspondence between the trumps and Hebrew letters. That correspondence is all the more suggestive because it rests upon three legs: the parallel between trumps and letter meanings, the parallel between trumps and letterforms, and the parallel between trumps and the Hebrew lexicon. Each of these parallels is striking in and of itself because their correspondences present themselves only when the trumps and letters are arranged in ordinal sequence (i.e, when the first trump is paired with the first letter, the second trump with the second letter, and so on through the series, with the unnumbered card being left to the final position.)
Whether or not these parallels are there by design or by coincidence is an open question but it is a question which finally warrants real investigation.
Thanks,
- Mark