Wait, please don't jump off that cliff!
Lady Orchard said:
have just started reading 78 degrees and was interested in the idea of the majors relating to the hebrew alphabet.
however there seems to be some discrepancy on the internet as to what letters relate to what cards?
I have found one site that says aleph is the magician and the fool is tav; but another said the fool is aleph.
help! which is correct before I read further on this??
While your question is but a few weeks old, please consider one more possibility: there was a tradition in the British Isles that associated the tree-letters of the insular Keltic alphabet NOT with 1-9, 10-90 by tens, and 100-900 by hundreds, but with the numerical symbols ‘no-thing’ through 16—17-21 kept secret but readily recoverable both by logic and by leaning on the trumps. The whole system, with 17-21 filled in (two letters, AA and II, were not included in the twenty-letter ogham cipher) and the Hebrew equivalents carefully deduced, is this:
0-H-hawthorn-cheyt
1-A-fir-alef
2-E-aspen-heh
3-I-yew-zayin
4-O-furze-ayin
5-B-birch-beyt
6-M-vine-mem
7-P-whitten-peh
8-F-alder, but Hebrew samekh
9-K-hazel-kaf
10-G-ivy-gimel
11-T-holly-tav
12-D-oak-dalet
13-N-ash-nun
14-L-rowan-lamedh
15-R-elder-reysh
16-S-willow-shin
17-U-heather-vav
18-Q(KK)-apple-qof
19-Y(II)-mistletoe/loranthus-yod
20-St(SS)-blackthorn-tzaddi
21-(AA)-palm-teyt
The symbolic and calendrical meaning of these trees, supplemented (and corroborated) by study of the forms of several ancient primary alphabets (the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the Meroitic, tifinag, Libyan, runic, and the ‘semi-primary’ Greek alphabet) in
addition to proto-Canaanite (old Semitic) and square Hebrew writing, shows clearly that these are the correlations that formed the basis for the trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles, which I take to be tarot’s original form
however many older
extant forms happen to still be around, centuries after the fact, the standard decks from early on being no doubt discarded and replaced.
This 'bardic' theory of tarot's origin—which has the advantage of symbolic clarity and of
not being purely speculative, as the ‘interchangeable theories’ bandied about today are—is presented in succinct form at:
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/index.php/Bardic_origin_of_Tarot,
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/index.php/The_Trumps_of_the_Consonants,
and
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/index.php/The_Bardic_Vowels.
Thanks. I have decided in the 1st instance to take the Fool as Aleph.
But ask yourself: why would Semites have chosen foolishness as the place for letters to begin? Does the
capacity for speech itself flow out of foolishness? or merely its manifestation at times? Alef is surely the levitator (Bateleur), for that is what speech is.
Take for example the Tower being Peh - mouth; to swallow and be full.
Peh seems to convey the mouth as organ of speech. The throat in breathing and in swallowing must, by careful reckoning, be tzaddi, and tzaddi-sofit (its final form), respectively. Interestingly, the rune for K shows the opened mouth of the poet
both in the sense of emitting wisdom
and in the sense of consuming protein, since K is the hazel, symbolizing whatever wisdom
or protein happens to be contained ‘in a nutshell’.
I see how the Tower relates to this - if you were to fill your mouth with thoughts, actions and beliefs, eventually you would have to swallow them... And also the idea of swallowing being a quick downwards action, as is lightning or indeed people falling from a tower.
But we think of the tower as initially being a quite devastating force; and often out of our control.
Precisely: you can see how stretched ‘swallowing as lightning’ sounds.
Now, on to refuting our resident ‘nihilist’:
Aeon418 said:
So you are suggesting that the hebrew alphabet is the sole basis for Tarot symbolism? History would suggest otherwise. The correlation between the hebrew alphabet and the Tarot happened a long time after the Tarot was originally created.
Quite true, meaning ‘correlation’ in its present form. But the alphabet itself forms the framework of a
very ancient tradition, and medieval lore linking it, in its insular Keltic form, to numbers corresponding to the trumps—quite distinct from the tabulative numbering of Hebrew and Greek alphabets, though
one (unity, the unit) stays the same—has survived: this tradition must have reached the Continent riding on the coattails of the Arthurian cycle.
To suggest that there is one true order is the same as saying that the Tree of Life is the framework of the universe, which is absurd.
It
is the framework of how every individual became an individual
in the universe.
I thought the notion of absolute truth went the same way as the dinosaurs.
Oh really. So 1 + 1 could be, say, 3? And how dare we depend on the Pythagorean theorem!
(Fulgour, you were right when you reputedly said “but then you have made 22 decisions,” even if you do like to ‘cut and run’.)