Greetings, King of Cups. May I respond to your comments in reverse order? for I feel I can more tactfully address them thereby (I’ll assume you said yes).
KingofCups said:
. . . people either wouldn't understand, or they would just chalk it up as a cute idea and move on to the next thing that comes along. We live in the era of information overload where repetition and redundancy rule. People can be shown the truth and they wouldn't even recognize it.
This
is the sad truth, I mean about the age we live in. But I would beg to differ with regard to GD’s ‘system’: yes, they seem to have preserved at least two important keys to the deeper teachings of Kabbalah that are mostly lost to us (unless we reconstruct it ourselves, based on what
has survived, as I think I have managed to do over a period of over three decades). But contrary to your saying . . .
. . . they knew more than they let on . . .
. . . , they had not actually penetrated all that deep
into mysteries they
professed to know, and this makes them 3-parts charlatan to 1-part sage, in my own (not always so humble) opinion, to wit, when you say:
Not "false", but, a purposefully different system which utilizes the same underlying logic. At least in regards to Alef at 0.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the same underlying logic’, but neither laying letters next to trumps in order starting with alef=1
or alef=0 matches up with the actual symbolism of the letters, since the trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles (as can be clearly shown) expressed letters according, again, to
bardic numeration (given in my earlier post). The
biggest problem keeping this from being generally known (besides general ignorance
of bardic numeration) is that the
letters themselves are much more poorly grasped today than they were by the originators of Kabbalah (and Tarot of Marseilles)
or the
originators (in a time
long before the Middle Ages) of Merkavah! And
Crowley knew so little about them that he did not even manage to match up D—
duir the oak, or
dalet the door
made of oak—with oak! And the rabbis of today are, sadly, just as ignorant of the greater context that would clarify the
exact meaning of each letter.
The only way I
know of to
rectify the problem is to correctly match up each Hebrew letter to its equivalent in the Irish
tree-aphabet and augment this with as much knowledge of
other ancient alphabets—especially Germanic runes (
closely related to tree-letters, the two letters standing for pillars Boaz and Jachin even retaining their tree
names), Tifinag (and closely related Libyan, or Numidian), Meroitic, plus the Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet whence this last sprang. One has a hard time penetrating to any real depth at
all where letters are concerned
without this background—and a bit more besides, as I found out when I parsed all the meanings of Semitic roots used in the Old Testament and
finally understood the meaning of
shin,
saille the willow, to be the
fount of spring its overflowing and drooping boughs symbolize (
many roots starting with shin mean ‘overflow’ and things close to that). And in fact it is my studied opinion that the only reason Kabbalah
did spring up when it did was Merkavah’s coming into contact with British bardic lore and seeing in it a close parallel, another branch from the same
much more ancient tree (of letter-tradition), the comparison enabling
both traditions to ‘fill each other’s holes’ and reconstruct something close to the original pristine knowledge that
spawned letters.
Taken, then, to its inevitable depths, this approach leads one (or at least me) to realize that in fact this older tradition that both hearken to is a relic of the
previous civilization on this earth, the one destroyed by the melt-off of the last Ice Age (and its accompanying catastrophic events), one which had an understanding of matter
and man that literally
dwarfs (in my opinion) that of our universities today. For it
integrated matter and mind: it maps out reality—that of particle physics, chemistry, biochemistry, plasma cosmology, Hermetic science, and ethics—at a level where ‘Cartesian dualism’ is a child’s delusion and matter and mind are interrelated—not
indistinguishable, but
interrelated—in the most
intimate way.
So no, I do not think that, as you said:
. . . people like Waite and Case were just mashing stuff at random to fit some preconceived ideas.
But there is a
definite limit to what they professed that is of any actual
value in ferreting out the deeper mysteries of Kabbalah and Hermetic
science (i.e. that which underlies the stipulations of astrology and the processes of alchemy).
Also, in regards to the different attributions of the planets/zodiac/organs/days of the week, etc., there is a logic behind them, it is not random at all, and it is probably beyond me to explain it just yet, but the answer lies in the permutations of YHVH which are laid out in the SY. It involves some cipher breaking, intuition, mathematics, and visual conceptualizing to figure out, but it is testable, logical and not mystically derived. This applies also to the GD planetary assignments, which follow this logic correctly.
I think you are ‘out on a limb’ here, and I’ll tell you why. Leaving aside the zodiacal attributions for a moment, the planetary and physiological attributions do not even
agree from version to version (Kaplan gives the several variants), which is also true
of the permutations of YHV. Now I think those given in I
believe it’s the Short version—in the order YHV-YVH-HYV-HVY-VYH-VHY—
are the correct ones (as I argue in my book). And there is probably a great deal about the Cube of Space that I have yet to fathom, I’ll grant you. But there is so much else
besides that can be gleaned from SY once some of the other blinds and jumbles have been set right, to wit:
The actual zodiacal order of the simple letters
themselves has been jumbled, which tree-calendar order and its
much more simply understood phonetic basis shows
conclusively: the order
should be (and undoubtedly originally was) samekh-tzaddi-cheyt-vav-ayin-qof-teyt-heh-zayin-yod-lamedh-nun. This allows us to completely
discard the silly list of organs said to correspond to them and restore to them their
original physiological correspondences: samekh is
shaped like head aries; tzaddi’s two forms
show throat taurus when breathing and when swallowing; cheyt
is the squared-off shoulders gemini; vav in its earlier Semitic form
is a breast (sign cancer) pouring forth milk; qof shows in cross-section the womb virgo; teyt is both the legs crossed under one when meditating and the serpentlike intestines that
end in libra the loins (the direction straight down from aries the head); heh
shows the male organ and clitoris (scorpio used to be assigned the organ ‘secrets’ in old almanacs), as an erect male organ reaching out from the right of the letter
to the opening for it on the left—and heh is even the letter added to Abraham’s name to
signify circumcision (a circumcised phallus even being visible on its trump, II LaPapesse), which is on the 8th day
because it is the 8th sign; zayin
shows both the spine’s terminal filament sagittary is in the closed (circular) zodiac and the thigh it is in the broken-and-extended one; yod
shows capricorn as both mid-spine and knee; lamedh
shows the arms swinging in a child learning to walk, as seen from the direction of the spine opposite the shoulders (aquarius in the
closed zodiac); and nun
shows pisces as both the back of the neck linking head and shoulders
and the two feet (seen from the same angle as are the kidneys
kaf stands for, i.e. from above with the body facing to our left).
As for the doubles, yes
one set of correlations has them as the sense organs, based on the fact that of the four senses (smell simply being earth’s sense
touch at its
most focused) only taste, water’s sense (since things must be in solution to be tasted), has only one sign in the manifested
bottom half of the zodiac (the doubles’ ultimate stations), but only as the triads were
originally, not as they are in astrology, for originally they were generated in the order fire-air-water-earth (natural order), as is evident from the tradition that the triangles pointing up and down in the ‘Seal of Solomon’ signify fire and
water, respectively, not fire and
air.
But there happen to be
two organ attributions for the doubles, for in a deeper sense (one completely
omitted from SY) beyt is the pineal, peh the rear half of the pituitary and feh-sofit its front half, dalet the lungs, tav the heart, gimel the adrenals, kaf the kidneys, and reysh the gonads. These correlations require knowledge of things the GD didn’t have a clue about.
Even the mothers contain a mystery. Yes, where they end up in relation to man makes shin fire, mem water, and alef air. But the
mystery of the three mothers whereby the three simples yod, heh, and vav are chosen is
not this
obvious (since stated) fact but something much more
fundamental to why the mothers are mothers: namely the fact that they stand for the original three letters of the Logos, AUM, with U altered to
sh as a means of ‘shushing things’ (hiding the secret). And this leads one into the mystery of the four Ofanim of Ezekiel’s vision and what these mean, which forms the
basis of Merkavah and yet has been
completely lost, though it is quite obvious or at least clear once discovered. They are the four wheels centered, respectively, atop the head of
Adam Qadmon—the primordial Adam, undivided, who is in essence the platonic Form ‘Upright Sentience’ (and also the type from which man is ultimately descended)—atop the head of
seated Adam, at the
heart of seated Adam, and at the heart of the
womb. Each is half the height of its predecessor and sits in its bottom half: mem-sofit is the center of the first and represents the box containing the Ark (to which intermediate mem is bowing); shin, at the center of the second wheel, is the crown atop the head of seated Adam (us); alef is the center of the third wheel, which is the zodiac of the body; and intermediate mem can be seen as the womb’s fourth wheel—which is dark like space because it is the
womb of time—or as the sign libra itself (where all wheels sit). For S (shin) and M (mem) in the
tree-calendar sit at the top and bottom of the round (early spring and the autumn equinox) respectively, while A (alef) is the yuletide
silver fir whose station is halfway between these two (even with the center).
The second wheel, by the way, shows the
surroundings of seated Adam, and since only its
bottom half is manifested (as opaque ground),
those seven signs (of it) are represented by the seven doubles. (The
first wheel is the all-containing Monad, the One.) And the Logos, by the way, can be confirmed in Egyptian—where the only three letters that were birds were
‘ (eagle),
w (quail chick), and
m (owl)—in the Tibetan mantra AUM, in the term for the High Self in the Huna tradition of Hawaii according to Max Freedom Long—Au-makua, ‘utterly trustworthy parental pair’, which the laws of that language’s construction allow us to also interpret as AUM-akua, AUM-being—in the suffixes of the ruffians Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum who slay the master builder Hiram Abiff for
not revealing to them the Word (that is, for not reuniting them
into it), and in the simple logic that since the Word stands for the three-part inner self—doer to act in the durationless present, thinker to think about what has
finite duration, and knower to know that which is
eternal in duration—it must consist of the vowel spectrum leading in from its midpoint to cover what phonetics calls the ‘back vowels’, that is, vowels which, because the pinching-off occurs in
front resonate in back. (The problem the Tibetans have is directly traceable to the fact that humans should pronounce the Logos or Word starting with the
front vowel spectrum—“ee-ah-oh-oom”—since
that half stands for the body and omitting it tends to remove the self
from its body, or in this case, its
country!)
I could go on, but hopefully you get the general picture by now. (If you or anyone is interested, I
will continue to expound what I’ve discovered in future posts . . . but so far, little interest seems to accrue from these wordy posts of mine . . . but I can still hope.)
Finally:
KingofCups said:
The origin of the language/logic that the SY describes is likely lost to history. Maybe it's Egyptian, maybe it's Ur, maybe a synthesis or something else entirely. What matters is the contents . . .
Yes! precisely. The phonetic
logic, fortunately, is recoverable, again using the tree-calendar (and ogham alphabet closely associated with it).
The half-circle or cup or Cauldron (as I call it, following Keltic tradition) formed by the bottom half of the surroundings (2nd wheel) is seen as the mouth, and the ‘world-egg’ or Egg in it—the third wheel or bodily torso itself—is seen as the tongue. Calendar order gives the signs of the Cauldron as D-T-K-M-G-P-B, with R left over as the thirteenth month; but this is easily restorable to the original
phonetic order P-T-K-R-G-D-B, with R as the Hebrew
guttural R at the bottom or gullet (throat), K and G next to it, and P and B up on the
lip or
rim, with T and D of course
in between. And calendar order gives the top five signs of the Egg as L-N-F-S-H, which go out the tongue voiced and back unvoiced; but in Hebrew aries is not F—feh-sofit—but rather samekh, because whereas the pagans worshiped Vran (Fran) as
fearn the alder, the F sound that extends or sprouts
beyond the tongue or seed (the seed of speech or incantation), the Semites (and I believe the Libyans also, as well as Egyptians) placed aries, the tip of the tongue,
on the tongue, an S sound, with the S-sound at taurus being the equivalent of the bardic Ss—s
straif the blackthorn—namely tzaddi, which
is slightly farther back than samekh on the tongue, since it is more of a
whistling sound.
The bottom seven signs of the Egg, then, derive originally from phonetic order of vowels going U-O-A Aa-E-I-Ii, with A (alef) drawn away to be the
center of the wheel to be replaced by qof or Q, which is bardic Kk, a doubling of the K that is that sign on the Cauldron—Q is
quert the apple and
still shows fruit with stem (and there are roots starting with qof that mean ‘fruit’ and ‘fruit harvest’ and ‘to cut off’ and so on, it being the month of late summer’s harvest) and symbolizes, of course, the ‘fruit of the womb’ or virgo (not to be confused with ‘fruit of the loom’). The rest yield U=vav, O=ayin, E=heh, Ii=yod—this last being
ixias the mistletoe (or loranthus, perhaps), which is why yod hovers
over the line (being rooted in another tree) instead of coming down
to the line—all by way of Greek, I=zayin or zeta
also by way of Greek (since zeta is the initial of Zeus because of erosion of D by I or Y, D being the original double occupying the same sign, albeit on the next wheel up), and Aa=teyt, by process of elimination: it’s the only letter left, hence one must presume that it was a vowel only in the Keltic alphabet Robert Graves reconstructs, which can be confirmed from other considerations as well (of which he was unaware) and suggests that the Hebrew
tamar, palm (Aa’s tree), may possibly have been spelt with a teyt instead of a tav (as with some other roots I’ve come across), but this is speculation. The vowels, you will notice, go from front to back
backwards from where they resonate, but it is clear what is conveyed is that the
closing-off of the mouth to
produce them goes from front to back, and indeed this inversion seems to be symbolic, at a core level, of the ultimate cause for the human condition: confusing the outer horizon (straight ahead) for the
only horizon, thus ignoring the
inner horizon, which is straight
back from straight ahead.
I think this is enough to show that there is a good deal more to these mysteries than is fully
revealed in SY—or the
Zohar or the
Bahir for that matter—and that great care should be taken not to sell oneself (or the mysteries themselves) short.
Cheers, shalom, n’ all that, and I hope some of this proves enlightening, or at least thought-provoking. (Your feedback, of course, would be welcomed.)