Phoenician letter correspondences & Astrological considerations

Fulgour

I Shall be the Reference

kwaw said:
Have you got a reference for that?
The evidence is the Phoenician alphabet. Since the alphabet perfectly corresponds to the seven planets, twelve houses, and the planetary exaltations, including the lunar nodes, it provides the documentation by its very existence.

Thus we may also see how the 22 Major Arcana cards of the Tarot may be seemlessly aligned with the underlying astrological attributions of the ancient Phoenician alphabet, beginning with Aleph and Le Bateleur, through Taw and Le Fol.
 

kwaw

Re: I Shall be the Reference

Fulgour said:
The evidence is the Phoenician alphabet. Since the alphabet perfectly corresponds to the seven planets, twelve houses, and the planetary exaltations, including the lunar nodes, it provides the documentation by its very existence.

Unfortunately the time scale between the origins of the Phoenician alphabet and the astrological signs/constellations and system of exaltations as we know them preclude any possibility of there being any such correlation between the two at the time of the inception of the Phoenician script.

Kwaw
 

Fulgour

upon this rock

Dear Kwaw,
It's been some time since we last chatted at the Tarot Salon, but we've always gotten along, and so here is my predicament. This thread was moved to Kabbalah (from Marseille) and I am not making any statements which I intend as concerning that subject.

My lights have revealed the connections of which I speak, and there are a number of excellent sources for further study.

http://phoenicia.org/alphabet.html

Illinois is balmy, how fare the Midlands?
 

jmd

Fulgour, the Forum will at some stage be renamed to include discussions on alphabetic correspondences generally - but requires a wait until an upgrade is due ('small' changes otherwise take up additional administrative time from Solandia).

I would have thought that precisely discussing the Phoenician alphabet with regards to astrological considerations (whether zodiacal, planetary, or their interelation) is what is here both at issue and illustrative of your views.

As a first step - and unless there is another point I missed, such as integrally relating Tarot imagery prior to the 1st century CE - the alphabetic sequence and its possible correlations with either element, sign or planet appears to me to be a later Hebrew Yetzirahic consideration 're-applied' to the earlier Phoenician alphabet.

If K Barry is correct (in his book The Greek Qabalah), even the Hebrew planetary/zodiacal/elemental attributions arise from neo-pythagorean/gnostic ones, with Hebrew attributions deriving from these.

Fulgour has stated that 'the planetary attributions are, so far as I know, mine alone'.

With regards to the Marseille imagery and sequence, it would indeed be interesting to see how Fulgour presents each card's imagery in the light of planetary exaltations (and this does better belong in the Marseille Forum).

Herein are the more underpinning discussions as to the relationship between Phoenician and astrological/elemental attributions. I suspect that these are the hesitations/questions which le_pendu, kwaw and I share - even if we may have varying views on myriad points of detail.

Of course, having questions and hesitations is a way of requesting further details, and shows not disinterest, but rather its opposite: interest in furthering our (and others') reflections.

Not only the 'what' (which are listed), but the 'why' and the 'when' become, at least for some of us, important.

It may be, for example, that the basis for the attributions are not from the direction in which questions have been phrased (whether clearly or implicitly). It could be, for example, that Fulgour first looked at the (Marseille) imagery; then and independently of this considered Hebrew's (& Greek's and Roman's) 'parent' alphabet - in this case still being twenty-two; considered early forms of astrology (specifically, planetary exaltations); realised that the Hebrew/Phoenician letter attribution already fitted the Marseille sequence in ordinal fashion; and that further the exaltations of the planets in the signs, as attributed to the letters (and here is the 'sticking' point) as attributed by the later Sefer Yetzirah to Hebrew (allowing for variations in planetary attributions) were reflected in the imagery of the Marseille.

Some such sequence of events and insights require multiple avenues of clarifications.

Firstly, why have the Phoenician split into three in later Hebrew fashion - again, if it is because it has, like Hebrew, such an apparent structure, fine. I am personally willing to accept such an answer. It shows that even though it may not have been recognised until centuries later (when it was considered for Greek and Hebrew), it nonetheless had that aspect. After all, that the number 'e' was not understood or discovered at a particular time does not imply that it had no existence at that time.

...but why go to the Phoenician as opposed to Hebrew?
 

Fulgour

La Papess: Science and Knowledge

jmd said:
...but why go to the Phoenician as opposed to Hebrew?
Phoenician alphabet, Chaldean astrology. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that there is a conncection between the missing exaltations of Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius, and the letters Sin, Mem, and Aleph. After all, the Moon is exalted in Taurus, and there is no reason to assume that any of this is arbitrary.
 

Fulgour

XXI Le Monde & Co.

I've been thinking about this last post, and something that occurred to me was how on card XXI Le Monde it is usually only the Bull that is shown withour a halo. Wouldn't it be interesting if that had something to do with exaltations or the lack thereof in the fixed signs of the zodiac?

correspondences might go:

I ~ XVIII
II ~ VI
XIII ~ XIIII
XXI ~ VIIII

Aleph/Air ~ Aquarius
MOON ~ Taurus
Mem/Water ~ Scorpio
'Sin/Fire ~ Leo

Now we may know what L'Hermite has under his cloak...
 

kwaw

Re: XXI Le Monde & Co.

Fulgour said:
I've been thinking about this last post, and something that occurred to me was how on card XXI Le Monde it is usually only the Bull that is shown withour a halo. Wouldn't it be interesting if that had something to do with exaltations or the lack thereof in the fixed signs of the zodiac?

..

Yes I have wondered before whether the lack of a halo on the bull could be related to the fact that Taurus is the only one of the fixed signs that houses a planetary exaltation. The bull is horned, the Moon is exalted in Taurus, and horns are symbolic of the Moon. If we take this as the last card in the series and speculate upon a correspondence with the last of the Hebrew letters Tau, then note that the Moon is attributed to the letter Tau in the older versions of the SY, so we could interpret the oddity of the Bull, Taurus the exaltation of the Moon, being distinguished on the last card in the series as a sort of cross reference to Tau, the last letter of the alphabet. We may also note that because of a mistranslation the idea of a 'horned' Moses, and the horn in such an instance being a replacement for a halo/shining face?

The exaltations do seem to fit with some of the cards. The Sun, symbol of Royalty, is exalted in Aries, an 'exalted king', an Emperor? The malefic Mars is exalted in the sign of the Greater Malefic Saturn Capricorn, some suitability therefore as home and exaltation of the malefics that it be attributed to the 'devil'. Mercury is 'on its own' among the planets in that its 'house' virgo is also the sign of its exaltation, and Virgo is also the 'fall' of Venus, emphasising the idea of isolation and therefore of some relevance to the 'hermit'. I have given in another thread some corresponces that for me suggest 'Strength' as possibly relating to Libra, in this case we may note that Libra is the 'fall' of the Sun, and in Strength the solar symbol the Lion is overpowered. The image of the overpowered Lion, called 'victory in war', is also one of the 'magical images' of one of the Libra decans [third I think, trying to remember of the top of my head]. Mercury, among whose symbols are jackals and dogs, is both in its fall and detriment in Pisces, could the two 'hounds of heaven' [denoting possibly the moon's nodes] on the Moon card reference also this 'dual' weakness of Mercury in Pisces?

Kwaw
 

Fulgour

I think you mean Mars

kwaw said:
...in Aries, an 'exalted king', an Emperor?
Since when is The Emperor supposed to be Aries?
The Empress, Venus, is hitched up with a Sun Sign?
Anyway, in the Tarot, Aries is The Queen of Wands.
 

kwaw

Re: I think you mean Mars

No not mars, aries.

Fulgour said:
Since when is The Emperor supposed to be Aries?
The Empress, Venus, is hitched up with a Sun Sign?
Anyway, in the Tarot, Aries is The Queen of Wands.

The GD tradition Emperor=Heh=Aries.

Kwaw
 

Fulgour

kwaw said:
The GD tradition Emperor=Heh=Aries.
How odd of them. That would make The Hierophant=Waw=Taurus,
which is hilarious.