Tree of Life & Lights (departure/experiment)

venicebard

That array of the Sefirot, with a middle pillar consisting of 1-4-7-10, is indeed the arrangement of Sefirot before the Fall. For the Sefirot arise from the 12-spoke wheel thus: 1 is straight up (Supreme Crown); 4 straight out towards ‘other’ (Lovingkindness); 7 straight down—the physical body, that which is subject to gravity (Holy Palace in the Bahir)—and 10, which completes what early Kabbalah called the individuation process of the Sefirot—ain, ‘nothing’, becoming ani, ‘I’—is straight back (from other) or towards self. The tradition in astrology has been corrupted: the three tetrads in their original order were (are) neutral(cardinal)-male-female (not cardinal-fixed-mutable); so 1-4-7-10 are neutral spokes, 2-5-8 male spokes, and 3-6-9 female spokes. At the Fall, however, Sefirot 4 through 10 each fall down one spoke (in Lurianic Kabbalah this is called the Shattering of the Vessels), so that Da'at (Knowledge), the ‘phantom’ pseudo-Sefirah, is the now abandoned 4th spoke (neutral), and Sefirot 4 & 7 are male, 5 & 8 female, 6, 9, & 10 neutral.

But a little over halfway through that video, it says: "Though card assignments vary from deck to deck, the Hebrew letter assignments used here are understood by many to be established in antiquity.” This is hooey. First of all, the Tarot of Marseilles did not exist in antiquity (no tarot did), and second of all, no actual research has been applied to arrive at the correlations given. The several highly varied modern correlations between trumps and letters are all based on ignorance: on simply arraying the trumps and letters in order side by side, then tweaking the order in some way to seem original. The actual original correlations (clearly demonstrable) were based on numbers given the tree-letters by medieval Celtic bardic tradition. Only 0-16 have come down to us, but 17-21 are easily recovered:

0: H-huath-hawthorn (cheyt)
1: A-ailm-fir (alef)
2: E-eadhe-aspen (heh)
3: I-idho-yew (zayin, Gr. zeta showing corruption of D by I, as in ‘Zeus’)
4: O-onn-furze (ayin)
5: B-beth-birch (beyt)
6: M-muin-vine (mem)
7: P-peith-whitten (peh)
8: F-fearn-alder (feh-sofit, but originally samekh)
9: K-coll-hazel (kaf)
10: G-gort-ivy (gimel)
11: T-tinne-holly (tav)
12: D-duir-oak (dalet)
13: N-nion-ash (nun)
14: L-luis-rowan (lamedh)
15: R-ruis-elder (reysh)
16: S-saille-willow (shin)
17: U-ura-heather (vav)
18: Kk or Q-quert-apple (qof)
19: Ii or Y-mistletoe[Gr. ixias] (yod)
20: Ss or St-straif-blackthorn (tzaddi)
21: Aa-ailm-palm (teyt, by process of elimination, Aa and Ii being suggested by Robert Graves as the two remaining hidden letters, Ii being easily confirmed [unbeknownst to Graves] by noting that yod in square Hebrew is the only letter that does not come down to the line on which one writes, just as mistletoe grows on another tree, not in soil)

Some of these, of course, require explanation (such as why teyt corresponds to bardic Aa, where Aa comes from, and so on), but the number symbolism here is directly related to the letters—5 counts the fingers of each hand, which is what we do when a child is born (birch symbolizes birth by its diminutive size and white bark); 10 counts the fingers on both hands, with which one clings (as does ivy); 9 reflects the ‘Nine Hazels of Poetic Art’ known to bardic lore; etc.—and not just an arbitrary assignment based on the order of letters in the alef-bet, in which the order of the twelve simples had already been jumbled: for aries the head is actually samekh—shaped like the head—not heh; gemini the shoulders is cheyt—shaped like shoulders-and-arms—not zayin; and so on. (The original order is recoverable from Celtic bardic lore, for the Celtic and Judaic traditions branched from the same ancient trunk but decayed differently, the original only now recoverable by overlaying the two traditions so that they fill each other’s holes.) So shin, which SY (Sefer Yetzirah) associates with fire and the head, is actually XVI LaMaisonDieu (or Lightning-Struck Tower); and mem, which is our “mmm” and which SY associates with water and ‘belly’ (i.e. lower torso), is VI L’Amoureux (The Lover, singular). I won’t bore you with a further breakdown, as you will probably (as most others here do) register my viewpoint as just one individual’s weird notion and move on anyway. But I thought I would respond to your post, since no-one else has (as yet).
 

venicebard

Oh great: the <i> and </i> no longer signal italics. I hate change! Or was it italics? Ah! (I shall go back and change them all.)
 

kwaw

But a little over halfway through that video, it says: "Though card assignments vary from deck to deck, the Hebrew letter assignments used here are understood by many to be established in antiquity.” This is hooey.

That it was established in antiquity is hooey - that it is 'understood' (propagated with but little undersanding, or rather with much misunderstanding) to be so by 'many' isn't (if by 'many' is meant the school of Christine Payne-Towler).
 

treedog

Celtic bardic tradition

Your correlations based on numbers given the tree-letters by medieval Celtic bardic tradition is fascinating. I had no idea. Thanks for that.