Re: XIV TEMPERANCE : SCORPIO
Fulgour said:
I'm pleased to see you have read Mr. Waite's opinion on this card,
Seeing as the deck was his creation, it seems that reading reading
his opinion about
his deck, would be the least we could do.
Fulgour said:
but have you taken the time to form your own?
[/B]
Yes, I have come to the opinion that A E Waite is probably the best source when it comes to his own deck.
Of course, other people may have differing opinions, but there is no reason why we should give any
weight to those opinions simply because people have them. I may have the opinion that the Earth is flat, but simply having that opinion does not make it so, and in the light of much persuasive evidence that the Earth is not flat, my opinion may seem uninformed, and fatuous, to other people who study the Earth.
Fulgour said:
Tarot is, after all, personal.
Then why do you say card XIV is attributed to Scorpio, when it could be attributed to any letter according to anyone's
personal whim, or agenda?
We could have a different letter, sign, and planet depending on the date and time, or according to whether the day is sunny or overcast, or when my dog last cocked its leg at any particular lamp post.
However, it does not shed any light on why Waite created the ideas that Pamela Smith iconified, which to me,
personally, seems more interesting than investigating a myriad of unfounded, and ill-informed theories.
Fulgour said:
Consider the following:
XIV Temperance
NUN - Individualization, Transformation.It is the depths of each one, outward journey to seek its potential at the bottom of oneself, its hidden talents, each o ne is born with a gift, a characteristic to work, each one has to separate, show its difference. It is the accomplished potentiality. Its ordinal Value east 14.
Corresponds to the sign of the Scorpion.
No it doesn't, not in Waite's, and the Golden Dawn, system of attributions.
And although you keep posting Joan Cole saying that the Waite deck is not "merely a Golden Deck", there is no suggestion whatsoever that she believes Golden Dawn attributions and meanings do not apply to the RWS.
In fact she implies the exact opposite. She says of the RWS;
"Often follows Book "T" in subtle ways - such as carving figures in the throne of a court card. In fact, part of the genius of this deck is that the minor arcana very frequently manage to capture both the older divinatory meanings (summarized in Mathers' 1888 document on the Tarot) in their pictures and the Golden Dawn meanings. "
Joan Cole
The basic mistake you seem to have made is in believing that the ordinal numbers of the Hebrew letters correlate, or are in any way connected, with the Roman numerals of the Trumps. Even with your system they will not match up exactly, there is still the problem of which letter you will assign to Trump 0.
A problem that the Golden Dawn, and almost certainly Waite, solved quite neatly by putting the Fool as Zero at the beginning of the sequence, and assigning the first Trump to the first Hebrew letter.
This is not to say that it is the
only system, or the
correct system, for occult Tarot, but it is the correct sequence for this paricular deck, and symbolised accordingly, as intended by the author.
Vincent