Basic Pathworking Q: Fool on Shin vs. Aleph

BTW,

With respect to the Margaret Peeke book, I'm not sure what to make of it. It really didn't do a lot for me and the explanations of the explanations of how certain cards worked being bumped one letter down was diffuse even by occult standards.

One thing is she mentioned Papus enough to make me wonder if her beliefs really fit the Traditional Martinist Order's outlook - ie. I'd heard that there was a tendency for certain Martinist groups to distance themselves from some of his innovations. Margaret definitely treated the Fool in a literal manner and really explained it the way most in the GD would explain the Devil - ie. in the case of the Fool it's the slavery to matter with an astral dog of unseen consequence biting his leg. The whole spread of the cards is shown in an involutionary manner, this is also the first time that I've seen anyone address the Hangman as similarly hanging by a rope and being dangled in sin (I'm used to it being just the opposite).

She seemed to really meditate more heavily on the shapes of Arabic numerals and the letters of the paths more than anyone I've seen to date. She had Gemini in two places - zayin and qoph, Mars was placed in kaph and Saturn on resh, I'm at least glad she didn't start putting constellations on doubles or planets on singles however she mostly ignored word attribution (ie. ox for aleph, etc.) and focused a lot more on body part attributions, even forgoing the planetary and zodiacal data more often than not.

On one hand I just have to consider myself lucky that I'm trying to figure things like this out in 2013 and not 1913, not even just for the lack of internet when this stuff was really gaining speed in the late 19th and early 20th century but also for how much pre-packaged and bow-tied products with the most of the chaff sorted out are available online for $9.99 plus shipping and handling. Makes me realize just how fortunate we are but also makes me realize that getting spoiled can be a certain danger as well.

The lower part of the tree has been of interest to me, too. I've been working with my own version (it's a few threads down from this) and maybe as a consequence the standard assignment doesn't make sense to me. Or maybe that's why I made my own version to fit.

In the Thoth Forum there was some good stuff about Temperance on path 25, and about the marriage of Sun and Moon. The Sun is very important in Thelema, what with the whole Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel and Liber Resh and all that. So far so good. That is enlightening, but why is Peh/Mars/The Tower crossing that path? And what about the Sun's second appearance on path 30? No one has answered, so maybe it is something I have to figure it out for myself.

I suspect that some insights will be clearer or easier with one version than the other. It's like those different ways of projecting a sphere onto a plane; you get different maps for different purposes. None is really right or wrong, but only more or less useful depending on your purpose. So I'd like to know what use people are making of the tree, but I really don't know where or how to ask.

edit: Our posts crossed; mine is in response to your last post on page 2. Peeke's book sounds... well, not for me. It is giving me mental static just reading about it.

Oh yeah, even with GD lots of things feel arbitrary on the surface. My bigger challenge is I'm still not 100% sure of what the spirit of it is, how much things things matter or why. The thing that confuses me somewhat as well even with the Case system is seeing that cards 15-21 are seven steps from materialist bondage (Devil) to cosmic consciousness (The World) but the pathworking everyone shows places all the cards in reverse order with 32 being the path of Tau for the World. In that sense reading the cards in a tableau vs. putting them on a tree seems to yield very different implications, or at least I have no clue at this point how to carry the implications over from one format to the next.

People claim that the 22 letters also split into two trees, two sets of sephira - one macro and one microcosmic. I get that both keys 10 and 21 have the four faces but while people seem to do sensible things with the 0-10 tree they'll do some really bizarre things with the 11-21 attributions.

Right now I'm reading Ronald Decker's "The Esoteric Tarot: Ancient Sources Rediscovered in Hermeticism and Cabala". He posits a 14 card major arcana that was subsequently expanded. He's found connections based around 7 and 10, and also argues that Virtues appear at regular intervals (2 = prudence, 5 = Beatitude, 8 = Justice, 11 = Fortitude, 14 = Temperance, 17 = Providence, 20 = Sagacity). Beatitude, Providence and Sagacity are due to Apuleius.

He explains the link between 5 and 15 by saying the first is universal blessing, the second is universal testing. (I've also seen them explained as: "do good" and "avoid evil"). It reads very well.

He doesn't think it came from Egypt, but arose partly due to a 15th century fascination with things Egyptian, a kind of "Egyptomania" that also occurred in the 17th century. Well, the 4 suits came from the Mamelukes, but the Majors are an Italian innovation, one that is best preserved in the Tarot de Marseille.

It seems like all of this stuff has been a work in progress that people have been pulling down from the inner planes. One of the more challenging issues with that is even if it were Egyptian, at that rate when the trail leaves the planet and Bodhisattvas or akashic record reading comes into play there's hardly any hope of doing any stable forensic-historical work unless a person's died, works on it from the inner plane, and decides to find a channel for a book to record their results. Seems many authorities claim that there are historical artifacts and books no longer in the physical world - such as for example the Book of Thoth - that can be accessed on the inner planes. All the more reason to keep meditating I suppose.

Cheiromancer said:

I am delighted to see a reference to Meditations on the Tarot, although mostly people respect the author's desire to be anonymous, even if this information is just a google search away.

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Getting back to this - one of the reasons why I probably haven't felt guarded about keeping his identity so much is that I knew it at the same time that I found out about the book. It was one of those cases where one good book leads to another. Robert Powell had a chapter right at the front of The Sophia Teachings, back when I was trying to figure out the whole Mariology thing and connect some of my own dots on it.

I am curious though as to what his reasons for wanting to be anonymous might have been. My best guess is that he didn't want people to recognize his name and just discount the information within the book along ideologue or partisan lines, at least back when enough people who knew him would have been the reviewers and picked it apart for all the wrong reasons. Might there be other reasons that are still as much an issue as they are then? I'm not sure. France does seem traditional in the extreme and he decided to write his book in French and publicize it post-mortem in the Fool-on-Shin format.

The last bit gets me thinking. My Masonic Tarot just arrived, gorgeous deck, it's also from a French Mason and it was completed in 1987. Tomberg as well was writing his letters in the early to mid 1960's for the most part. I have to wonder (please don't hate the newb for mastering the obvious if this is the case ) whether sticking with original Levi/Papus format is a decisively western European and Martinist thing whereas the Brits, Americans, and commonwealths tend more toward the GD lines of thought. From Meditations on the Tarot I might also consider Russia in the same camp as Western Europe also.

It seems that the GD (and the Smith-Waite deck) is influential mostly in English speaking countries. On the Continent the Tarot de Marseille seems primary. When there are esoteric theorizing, it is mostly French authors who are influential (as well you might expect). It has been a while since I read Meditations on the Tarot - I don't know if he ever alludes to there being an alternate form of the Tarot. Or even alternate versions of the TdM. I believe it is known exactly which deck he was looking at; somewhere the Unknown Author describes a card in enough detail to determine this. I just forget which one it was.

I believe that the UA has a very distinctive writing style, and I find it hard to believe that he expected his anonymity to remain preserved. I don't know why he wanted to be anonymous. I do seem to recall reading that there was an unpleasant break with the Anthroposophists, based on his "jesuitry". That is, the accommodations he makes to remain compatible with the basic teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. (He tacks close to the wind with reincarnation, though.) The afterword by Cardinal Von Balthazar is noteworthy; rarely do esoteric texts get that kind of endorsement. It may be that the UA didn't want his known association with Rudolph Steiner to get in the way of a reader. These concerns seem quaint at this remove in time.

Cheiromancer said:

It seems that the GD (and the Smith-Waite deck) is influential mostly in English speaking countries. On the Continent the Tarot de Marseille seems primary. When there are esoteric theorizing, it is mostly French authors who are influential (as well you might expect). It has been a while since I read Meditations on the Tarot - I don't know if he ever alludes to there being an alternate form of the Tarot. Or even alternate versions of the TdM. I believe it is known exactly which deck he was looking at; somewhere the Unknown Author describes a card in enough detail to determine this. I just forget which one it was.

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I brought it up because I was rereading the Key 1: Magician today. One of the interesting things he does when talking about information-by-analogy is that he talks about the key of the chariot and some seven or eight different planetary/zodiacal assignments of the card, only noting Crowley toward the end of the list for Cancer.

Cheiromancer said:

I believe that the UA has a very distinctive writing style, and I find it hard to believe that he expected his anonymity to remain preserved. I don't know why he wanted to be anonymous. I do seem to recall reading that there was an unpleasant break with the Anthroposophists, based on his "jesuitry". That is, the accommodations he makes to remain compatible with the basic teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. (He tacks close to the wind with reincarnation, though.) The afterword by Cardinal Von Balthazar is noteworthy; rarely do esoteric texts get that kind of endorsement. It may be that the UA didn't want his known association with Rudolph Steiner to get in the way of a reader. These concerns seem quaint at this remove in time.

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That's true, and I do remember Sergei Prokofieff writing a book about this book - I'm sure he and Powell have had major variances over the years as well with Powell seeming to head in a similar direction to that of UA.

I've read that Tomberg felt that his previous involvement with Anthroposophy was erroneous, and no longer wanted to be associated with it. His Meditations on the Tarot, presumably, were not meant to lead people to those earlier writings. Thus his anonymity.

Just a theory, but it would seem to make sense. The excerpts I've seen of his Christ and Sophia seem... peculiar. A little jarring after reading from the Meditations.

What is pathworking - is it exploring or buidling? Often it seems like building as people instruct it- like building a palace of memory. Visualize this door, go through it, visualize this symbl/letter, etc.

Well, that's building, not exploring... so is pathworking about exploring some sort of supranatural territory or building one? If one is exploring, one will find stuff (symbol letter there, whatever), if building, one will place it - if one places it does it matter if say, on the street of the fool it is alef, or shin or tau? If it is, after all, some inner-city psycho-scape?

I like to take the cards to bed with me - lucid dreams feel more like exploring than building - but I do both.