Abrac said:
I've been on the fence about this question for a long time, but finally I've decided the trumps originally had no connection with the Hebrew alphabet. This came later in tarot's development.
I disagree only in that the bardic tree-alphabet on which the trumps actually (and demonstrably, IMO)
are based is itself a branch of the same extremely ancient tradition the Hebrew alphabet was (is), such that when the Hebrew and insular Celtic alphabet-traditions are superimposed on each other (as they undoubtedly were in 12th-century Provence) they fill each others gaps and correct each others blinds! (Both traditions place S-shin at the head, M-mem at the ‘belly’ or loins, and A-alef halfway between the two, where it stands for the trunk connecting them; and the tree-calendar formed by the Celtic consonants groups the seven doubles together on the waning year's half of the round.)
The strongest evidence for this is that they originally had 21 numbered cards and an unnumbered wild card, not 22 numbered cards. Any similarity with the Hebrew alphabet in decks with an unnumbered Fool is probably coincidental in my view. The numbers 21 and 56 are more suggestive of a connection with dice and gambling than anything, as demonstrated by Robert Place in The Tarot.
The unnumbered LeMat SEEMS extraneous until the numbering of letters used by the bards of Britain and Ireland is taken into account (on which the ranking of trumps was based, as is easily proved IMO): there, one of the tree-letters was associated with 'no number', namely H, huath the hawthorn, which is Hebrew cheyt, shaped like shoulders-and-arms as indeed it should be, since H the hawthorn stands at gemini in the tree-calendar. Since gemini is the sign immediately preceding (hence above) the sign straight ahead (cancer, the breast)—which points to the outer horizon—gemini symbolizes what MAKES it a horizon, namely the space above it: space = no thing (pure Substance). And the Fool at court traditionally talks nonsense, that is, no-thing. Indeed the pattern of dots about the mantle of the Fool shows the DESIGNER knew which sign it represented, for there are five hanging from the mantle, surmounted by two red dots where pole intersects it—representing the horizontal diameter or line of manifestation cancer-capricorn—the one on the left (cancer), then, surmounted by the red dot on the part of his headdress that sticks out to the left—CLEARLY pointing us to sign gemini, pure Substance or space (no thing). Indeed the sound H itself EXPRESSES a wisp of nothing (the exhaled breath).
If the implications of this are of any interest to you, they are expounded (in somewhat abbreviated form) here:
http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Bardic_origin_of_Tarot
The numbering from 17-21 was kept secret, and indeed two of the letters had to be surmised by Robert Graves (in
The White Goddess), but how the reconstructed 22-letter tree-alphabet fills numbers 17-21 becomes quite obvious once the trump images are taken into account, as they match what one would surmise from numbers, i.e. the fact that Q (qof) is doubled C (K) or 9, hence 18, that U (vav) the heather represented summer, the full moon, one's coming of age, which in Irish myth was age 17 (The Star shows the mixing of fluids in coition, just as vav means 'and' in Hebrew), and so on.
and an interesting concept; but for me - little merit.