beanu said:
VeniceBard, how do you tie all this together?
(I’m a he: name’s Gary, glad to meet.)
The square-Hebrew shapes
are a valuable corroboration of the original order of the twelve ‘simple letters’ specified in
Sefer Yetzirah, which bardic tradition allows us to restore the original order of in spite of their being reordered in the Hebrew alef-bet: their shapes show the parts of the body referred to by their signs (samekh-head, tzaddi-throat, cheyt-shoulders, etc.). But in general they are a poor place to start.
The old Canaanite alef was an ox’s head and stood for motive power. But it is a specific type of motive power, in that its tree-letter is ailm the silver fir (or else pine), symbol of loftiness (fir limits outward growth of limbs to redirect energy upwards). So it is the motive power of
lift along the axis of uprightness. This is apparent also from its Egyptian counterpart, the hieroglyph of an eagle (actually, the eagle-like Egyptian vulture), which rises to great height by riding a thermal: it must glide round in a circle else it will exit the thermal and cease to ascend. Thus the ox’s head here symbolizes the power that when confined to a circle (like fir’s limbs) turns the pump that lifts water up from the water table to where the crops are (the area of Canaan tending to aridity).
Alef’s trump, based in this one case on both Hebrew and bardic numbering, is I LeBateleur. This is obvious, now that we know the letter’s esoteric meaning (lift), for the most important skill of the stage magician is to levitate. Its number,
one, means that in so doing the performer
unites all present (his audience). So in addition to being
lift, it is what rises above the crowd to attract its
attention: for ultimately, alef or A is the doer in man—the psyche—and forms the creative beginning of the Word or Logos (AUM, as in “I am the alpha and omega,” to which one answers “Mmm”)—it ‘gets our attention’ (as in the sound of a groan or the Irish vocative particle á). It is also the creative beginning of the Word in the more general sense usually meant, namely letters or speech, being both the first letter of the alef-bet and the letter numbered
one in both traditions.
Furthermore, alef is one of the three ‘mother letters’ specified in
Sefer Yetzirah: alef, shin, and mem. The origin of this doctrine is that there are four wheels (seen by Ezekiel):
1) The wheel centered atop the head of standing Adam Qadmon (primordial, sexless Adam), which represents Unity and goes from up to out to down to in to up.
2) The wheel half its height, centered atop the head of
seated Adam (us) and representing our surroundings, the lower half of which is manifested (ground) and consists of seven signs, the seven ‘double letters’ (P-T-K-R-G-D-B).
3) The wheel half
its height, centered at the
heart of Adam and representing the zodiac of the human form (the twelve ‘simple letters’).
4) The wheel half
its height, which is the round of the womb whereby one enters physical existence.
The first three are mothers in that each has another wheel in its ‘belly’ or lower half. The first wheel is mem, or more precisely mem-sofit (mem’s final form); the second is shin; and the third is alef. Shin in this context is a shushing of the U of the Logos, AUM, so that from the physical world (the fourth wheel or womb of time, which one intones as the smile, “ee”) one ascends in a smooth sequence to the doer A (third wheel, intoned as “ah”), the thinker U (shin, the second wheel, intoned as “oo”), and the knower M (fourth wheel, intoned as “mm”). Doer, thinker, and knower are the parts of the self that deal, respectively, with the fleeting present, with what has finite duration, and with what is eternal (from Plato’s analysis in chapter 19 of
The Republic).
As for Wikipedia, alef is not twentieth in ogham but rather sixteenth, the first of the five vowels that are kept at the end because vowels were once excluded from the sequence: in bronze age Scandinavia, what was used was
ogam consaine, consisting only of the fifteen consonants. It is this omission of the fourth group of five, the vowels, that is indicated by the ‘missing’ fourth leg of the table in the trump (hidden behind the mountebank’s own leg).
Now: bardic numeration was only preserved for 0-16, but 17-21 are easy to reconstruct, using number logic, tarot trumps, and the two extra letters hypothesized by Robert Graves in
The White Goddess, Aa (ailm as ‘palm’) and Ii (mistletoe,
ixias in Greek), these two bringing the number of letters from the 20 of ogham up to the 22 of Hebrew. Since Ii is the mistletoe (or loranthus, possibly), a ‘tree’ that grows from other trees rather than from soil, it is obviously Hebrew yod, which hovers above the line on which we write, unlike any other letter. This means that I itself (idho the yew) must be zayin, which as Greek zeta, the initial of Zeus, represents the corruption of D
by I or Y—a hardened I like our J! And since aleph is A, bardic Aa must correspond, by process of elimination, to teyt or theta, as indeed the shape of the letter confirms once we analyze what the palm symbolizes: location, location, location (i.e. the tropics, seen from the deck of a ship). Just so, teyt in old Canaanite is our heliport sign, which was the Egyptian ideogram for ‘place’.
Hence the complete sequence is:
0 (no number): H, corresponding to cheyt or eta.
1: A, alef/alpha; ailm, silver fir (or pine).
2: E, heh/epsilon; eadhe, quivering aspen.
3: I, zayin/zeta; idho, yew.
4: O, ayin/omicron; onn, furze.
5: B, beyt/beta; beth, birch.
6: M, mem/mu; muin, vine.
7: P, peh/pi; peith, water elder, in whose place ogham has Ng, ngetal, reed (
or broom).
8: F, whose place (aries) is held by samekh/xi (even though Canaanite samekh was the same as Ng in
ogam consaine), for reasons I will explain once we get to samekh and peh.
9: K, kaf/kappa; coll, hazel.
10: G, gimel/gamma; gort, ivy.
11: T, tav/tau; tinne, holly.
12: D, dalet/delta; duir, oak.
13: N, nun/nu; nion, ash.
14: L, lamedh/lambda; luis, rowan.
15: R, reysh/ro(sp?); ruis, elder.
16: S, shin/sigma; saille, willow.
[17:] U, vav/upsilon; ura, heather.
[18:] Q (Kk), qof/qoppa (later phi?); quert, apple.
[19:] Y (Ii), yod/iota; mistletoe [Gr.
ixias] or loranthus.
[20:] St (Ss), tzaddi/san (later psi?); straif, blackthorn.
[21:] Aa, teyt/theta; ailm, palm.
The five at the end are determined as follows. Since A and I are 1 and 3, Aa and Ii are first- and third-from-the-end. Since Q is Kk and K is 9, Q (Kk) is twice 9, or 18. Since V is Roman numeral 5, U (V) is fifth-from-the-end, since B takes its more obvious place at 5. This leaves 20 to be Ss, and indeed straif the blackthorn signifies strife—it is the vanguard of the wood in reclaiming farmland, hence ‘the mother of the wood’ in French (La Mère du Bois)—which is 10 opposing 10 (that is, two opposing wills as to what the 10 fingers might grasp).
The trumps confirm all this. Star, 17, shows a naked woman mixing two fluids, heather being the bed of lovers’ trysts (vowel of summer and of love’s consummation), 17 being when one comes of age in Irish mythology. Moon, 18, shows a face taking refuge (from dogs) in the moon: apple is glossed ‘shelter of a hind’ in the
Book of Ballymote. Sun, 19, refers to mistletoe’s being Virgil’s ‘Golden Bough’ (the term for alchemist in Keltic Britain, Pferyllt, is thought to be a corruption of the name Virgil). Judgement, 20, has a trumpet and shows pikes or spikes emerging from the smoke and dust of battle, as it represents the
ultimate battle. And World, 21, signifies one’s location, as well as the laurels of victory (for which palm is often substituted).
Personally, I put the card on the spheres, not the paths, and the Fool goes in Kether.
I think the letter-to-path correlations of today's ‘Hermetic Kabbalah’ are probably correct, based on the order in which letters feed into the central Sefirah of Tiferet: gimel-heh-zayin-yod-lamedh-nun-samekh-ayin, or scorpio on the Cauldron (of the seven ‘double letters’), followed by scorpio through aries of the Egg (of the twelve ‘simple letters’), followed by the vowel of spring, the season to which this ascent of the back side of the zodiac leads. But I discovered this only a few years ago and have not yet had time to really analyze the paths (that is, it is still too early for me to say much concerning them). Letter-to-trump correlations that follow Hebrew letter-order are not correct, though. And I take Crowley with a grain of salt, since he was an utter charlatan in my estimation.
It is to the Sefirot that letter-trumps refer most directly, though, namely 1-10 versus first-through-tenth-from-the-end (21-12): this Tree and its reflection both emerge from 0 and meet in 11. This yields the situation referred to in the Lurianic doctrine of the ‘breaking of the vessels’, wherein 1-3 remain intact: 1-11-21, 2-11-20, and 3-11-19 all form coherent groups, which 4-11-18, 5-11-17, and so on do not. For 1-11-21 are all
one thing—in relation to itself, in relation to one ten-fingered being, and in relation to two ten-fingered beings—while 2-11-20 are all numerological 2s (by digital sum) and 3-11-19 are all of +1 valence (meaning one available valence electron).
(I’ll bih bahk.)