Daemon said:
I think it would be so cool if there was a Qabbalah deck. The major arcana could be yetzirot and the like, the suits would be symbolized by the 4 archangels...
??? There is, sort of. It is called Tarot of Marseilles, which as I see it had to be the original tarot since it embodies Qabbalah with absolute precision, albeit in a non-Judaic context: it hearkens NOT from later ‘Christian Kabbalah’ but from medieval Gnosticism as it flourished in the context of Brito-Irish bardic tradition, whose influx onto the Continent led to the meeting of bardic and Judaic traditions (branches of the same more ancient trunk) in the region south of (then) France—the ‘Midi’—and out of this sprang both Qabbalah and tarot, albeit the latter a bit later than the former by all accounts.
Later decks that made the court into an even number of males and females pervert the precise correlation of court cards
to the Shemhamforesh (yod-heh-vav-heh): the usual division into male yod and vav coupled to the female hehs leaves out the most important (lost) aspect of the tradition, namely that yod and vav are the male and female
roots, yod the mistletoe-like loranthus that once stood for sperm (among other things), which hovers above the line as its ‘tree’ does above ground, and vav a breast-pouring-forth-milk in its earlier Semitic form (whence sprang Phoenician). What got things confused in the surviving tradition (and believe me, I have given a lot of thought to this) was that vav, being 6 (the 6 directions of space) in Hebrew tradition, stood for the space
in the female
for the male, the six Sefirot of its Partzuf or face being identified then with what fills that space, rather than with the space itself. In their original distribution about the round (see my reply to Dulcimer, below), the simples yod and heh both fall to the capricorn-winter-backbone-male side of the round (at capricorn and scorpio, respectively), the simple vav to the cancer-summer-breast-female side (at cancer, the breasts).
Given this, then, one has 16 court cards to represent the Shemhamforesh resounding through four worlds (Ezekiel’s ‘wheels’), corresponding to mother-letter shin’s (S’s)
bardic number 16, 40 numbered cards to represent the Sefirot throughout those same four worlds, corresponding to mother-letter mem’s (M’s) Hebrew number 40, and 22 trumps to represent the 22 letters of the alef-bet—actually, the 22 letters of the complete bethluisnion or tree-alphabet, reconstructed (from the surviving 20-letter version) by Graves in
The White Goddess—corresponding to mother-letter alef (1, inception, creation, the doer), out of which the letters spring.
Dulcimer said:
Just to clarify: the Hebrew written language is made up of 22 consonants. The vowels are indicated by small signs positioned below or above the consonants.
True, true. But allow me to add that indications are that the tradition of letters goes back considerably beyond the beginnings of Hebrew
or Keltic lore and originally included (has always included) the vowels as part of the 22-letter sequence itself, vowels then being suppressed in common use—either truncated away, as in early Scandinavian Tifinag and bronze age
ogam consaine (vowel-less ogham), or else ‘converted’, as in Egyptian, Hebrew, later Tifinag, and Libyan, yet they are present in the Greek, Germanic (runic), and Meroitic alphabets, as well as the complete form of ogham (taboo on permanent inscription of which in the British Isles was not lifted till some centuries into the Christian era). And their echo even in Hebrew is that the three letters of the Name, as well as alef itself, often (in the case of heh) or mostly (in the case of the rest) have vowel force, as can ayin I gather, but most importantly that the original distribution of simples about the round—confirmed once restored by the letter-shapes themselves (samekh being the only aries-the-head-shaped letter, and so on)—is now only recoverable by reference to the calendar-alphabet of tree-letters and seasonal placement of the original vowel-equivalents of some of the simples, which turn out to stand at the tongue-root, meaning at six of the seven signs of the lower half of the round seen as a symbol of the tongue. Among the many things confirming this scheme is the fact that mem and teyt both occur at the point directly beneath the one seated in meditation, both being in appearance much like one’s legs folded beneath one while meditating.
Part of what confirms the distribution of yod-heh-vav mentioned above is that immediately after alef or 1 in the alef-bet come beyt-gimel-dalet at 2-3-4: while Lurianic Kabbalah’s doctrine of the
Partzufim puts yod at 2, heh at 3, and vav at 4-9, the calendar of tree-letters (and phonetic coherence) dictates that double-letters beyt-gimel-dalet occupy the
same three signs (in the same order), only on the Cauldron, which is the bottom half of the wheel twice as tall
containing the round of the simples, which represents the
surroundings of the one who meditates, the mouth
containing the round of the tongue, being attached to it at the bottom or tongue-root, where the vowels are.
[The distribution (starting at summer solstice) D-T-K-R/M-G-P-B, with guttural (Hebrew) R at the throat or gullet and G and K next to it, shows itself to be from an original P-T-K-R-G-D-B that placed labials B and P on the lip or rim, calendar-order itself arising from transposition of D and P, caused by thought's swing from
that which leads to self-knowledge to
that which arises from sensation.
]