JackofWands
Crowley's Liber 777 is more or less the seminal work on magickal correspondences with the paths of the Tree of Life. While I don't practice magick, I do occasionally like to use some of the symbolism in the 777 in my reflective work with the Tarot and the Tree of Life.
But here's my problem: I loathe the way that Crowley has assigned the Major Arcana to the Tree of Life starting at the top and working numerically down. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my solution to this and other qualms regarding the Tree of Life is generally just to work with multiple iterations of the glyph depending on my needs at a given moment; however, when I'm working with a Tree that has different card-path assignments or even a completely different structure, I'm not sure what the best way is to apply the correspondences from the 777 that I still want to use.
Part of me thinks that the best thing to do is to take each card's set of correspondences as a complete unit, regardless of which path the card occupies. (e.g., the Hermit's plant association, the snowdrop, remains linked to the Hermit, and not to path 20.) This makes sense with a number of the correspondences, particularly the astrological ones.
However, there's also part of me that sees the logic in holding the correspondences to the paths, not to the cards associated therewith. This is especially true with something like geometrical symbolism, which is explicitly derived from the paths themselves and not from the symbolism of the Tarot. I can also see an argument for retaining the aesthetic structure of the various color scales as-is, rather than rearranging the colors to suit a different arrangement of the cards.
As with all things, the solution here is probably a happy medium--going by card for some correspondences and by path number for others--but I can't figure out where the dividing line is on which should be which. For example, I can see the "Precious Stones" table of correspondences, swinging either way. Has anyone else come up against this difficulty? Do you have thoughts on the matter?
But here's my problem: I loathe the way that Crowley has assigned the Major Arcana to the Tree of Life starting at the top and working numerically down. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my solution to this and other qualms regarding the Tree of Life is generally just to work with multiple iterations of the glyph depending on my needs at a given moment; however, when I'm working with a Tree that has different card-path assignments or even a completely different structure, I'm not sure what the best way is to apply the correspondences from the 777 that I still want to use.
Part of me thinks that the best thing to do is to take each card's set of correspondences as a complete unit, regardless of which path the card occupies. (e.g., the Hermit's plant association, the snowdrop, remains linked to the Hermit, and not to path 20.) This makes sense with a number of the correspondences, particularly the astrological ones.
However, there's also part of me that sees the logic in holding the correspondences to the paths, not to the cards associated therewith. This is especially true with something like geometrical symbolism, which is explicitly derived from the paths themselves and not from the symbolism of the Tarot. I can also see an argument for retaining the aesthetic structure of the various color scales as-is, rather than rearranging the colors to suit a different arrangement of the cards.
As with all things, the solution here is probably a happy medium--going by card for some correspondences and by path number for others--but I can't figure out where the dividing line is on which should be which. For example, I can see the "Precious Stones" table of correspondences, swinging either way. Has anyone else come up against this difficulty? Do you have thoughts on the matter?