Breakbeat_Mystic
First of all I should introduce myself, just started my account today and this looks like a great place to stop in with general questions and ideas.
I started really looking into western esotericism earlier this year after having about nine months perusing more general public level stuff (ie. NDE, new age, etc.). After a good few months worth of reading Anthroposophy and Steiner material I found out about Valentin Tomberg's Meditation on the Tarot, finished that and picked up some of Paul Foster Case's work, followed up with Dion Fortune and Gareth Knight and the rest has been history!
At present I'm noticing that there seems to be a concurrent variance of assignments of Hebrew letters to the 22 major arcana. The Golden Dawn stream of thought puts the Fool on aleph and runs keys 1 through 20 as beth through shin. The tarot that Eliphas Levi endorsed was in line with the Marseilles which Oswald Wirth later refined, however while Golden Dawn made the claim that the Fool on shin was a well informed blind (well-informed in that the shin placement hinted at the proper one, fire = spirit) and they went about putting him on Aleph, moving the other cards forward, swapping Strength and Justice and more recently deciding to make another pole swap with the Emperor and the Star, plenty of esoteric packs still seem to prefer the same attributions with the Fool on shin.
My question - from my reading I'm pretty familiar with the Golden Dawn way of doing pathworking, however I don't have familiarity with how those who prefer Fool on shin, Magician on aleph like to work the symbolism. I'm trying to figure out whether they run the keys in order accordingly and weave a slightly different narrative, whether any innovative pole-swapping has been done in that community with respect to keys and alphas, or whether they somewhat arbitrarily consider the alphas for the cards in one way and then do their pathworking identical to the Golden Dawn system.
When I had the chance to look at what happens with the Fool on the 31st path it seems like a mix of positive and negative things happen. One of the more notable positives is the Star moving to the 27th path which shows her playing with equilibrium between Netzach and Hod. One of the stranger anomalies is the Devil's placement with Samech which goes on the 25th path between Yesod and Tiphareth, path-of-the-arrow seems like a rather awkward position for that card. As of right now I just got the Oswald Wirth deck and I have another highly symbolic deck, the Beauchard Masonic, coming that also goes with the old fashion line-up. Any suggestions for this mode of pathworking or authors I should read would be great.
I started really looking into western esotericism earlier this year after having about nine months perusing more general public level stuff (ie. NDE, new age, etc.). After a good few months worth of reading Anthroposophy and Steiner material I found out about Valentin Tomberg's Meditation on the Tarot, finished that and picked up some of Paul Foster Case's work, followed up with Dion Fortune and Gareth Knight and the rest has been history!
At present I'm noticing that there seems to be a concurrent variance of assignments of Hebrew letters to the 22 major arcana. The Golden Dawn stream of thought puts the Fool on aleph and runs keys 1 through 20 as beth through shin. The tarot that Eliphas Levi endorsed was in line with the Marseilles which Oswald Wirth later refined, however while Golden Dawn made the claim that the Fool on shin was a well informed blind (well-informed in that the shin placement hinted at the proper one, fire = spirit) and they went about putting him on Aleph, moving the other cards forward, swapping Strength and Justice and more recently deciding to make another pole swap with the Emperor and the Star, plenty of esoteric packs still seem to prefer the same attributions with the Fool on shin.
My question - from my reading I'm pretty familiar with the Golden Dawn way of doing pathworking, however I don't have familiarity with how those who prefer Fool on shin, Magician on aleph like to work the symbolism. I'm trying to figure out whether they run the keys in order accordingly and weave a slightly different narrative, whether any innovative pole-swapping has been done in that community with respect to keys and alphas, or whether they somewhat arbitrarily consider the alphas for the cards in one way and then do their pathworking identical to the Golden Dawn system.
When I had the chance to look at what happens with the Fool on the 31st path it seems like a mix of positive and negative things happen. One of the more notable positives is the Star moving to the 27th path which shows her playing with equilibrium between Netzach and Hod. One of the stranger anomalies is the Devil's placement with Samech which goes on the 25th path between Yesod and Tiphareth, path-of-the-arrow seems like a rather awkward position for that card. As of right now I just got the Oswald Wirth deck and I have another highly symbolic deck, the Beauchard Masonic, coming that also goes with the old fashion line-up. Any suggestions for this mode of pathworking or authors I should read would be great.