Whilst it is useful for those who wish to follow Golden Dawn views to know what these are, it would be also useful to read what people make of these.
You are correct, Hans Idle, that I tend to favour, as others also do, a correlation of Alef = 1 = Bateleur &c...
For each of us who do make Hebrew letter correlations, it is also of course important to reflect on what kind of correlations arise in the 'nine chambers' if we also accept that this has relevant importance.
The two major letter attributions give us the following (for the GD version, with the transposed placements of Justice and Strength, and the numbering of the Fool as zero).
I have made the sequence
I - XXI + Fool gold, and the
GD sequence green.
Also, the top numbers refer the the ordinal arrangement, the next row to the value of the Hebrew letters, and the next two to the various sequences as mentioned above.
Code:
21 12 3 | 20 11 2 | 19 10 1
300 30 3 | 200 20 2 | 100 10 1
[color=gold]XXI XII III[/color] |[color=gold] XX XI II [/color]|[color=gold]XVIIII X I[/color]
[color=chartreuse] 20 11 2 [/color]|[color=chartreuse] 19 10 1 [/color]|[color=chartreuse] 18 9 0[/color]
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
---- 15 6 | ---- 14 5 | 22 13 4
600 60 6 | 500 50 5 | 400 40 4
[color=gold]XV VI [/color]|[color=gold] XIIII V [/color]|[color=gold] Fou XIII IIII[/color]
[color=chartreuse]14 5 [/color]|[color=chartreuse] 13 4 [/color]|[color=chartreuse] 21 12 3[/color]
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
---- 18 9 | ---- 17 8 | ---- 16 7
900 90 9 | 800 80 8 | 700 70 7
[color=gold]XVIII VIIII [/color]|[color=gold] XVII VIII[/color]|[color=gold] XVI VII[/color]
[color=chartreuse]17 8 [/color]|[color=chartreuse] 16 7 [/color]|[color=chartreuse] 15 6[/color]
One thing one may observe straight away is that the arrangements in gold have a direct ordinal correlation: the seventeenth letter is correlated with the card numbered XVII. The GD variant shows that more thought as to the reasons for those correlations has to be investigated.
The numbers 500 to 900, by the way, refer to five letters that take a different form when placed at the end of a word, and thus also gain a different value (for example,
Mem, that normally has a value of 40, becomes 600 when located at the end of a word).
If one reflects on the pairs and triplets thus created, various insights of course may be gained - in some ways, one may also say this of
any pairs and/or triplets made. The question that needs to also be asked, in my opinion, is whether these pairings and triplets reveal something that appears more intrinsic to Tarot (as I personally view the I/XI; II/XII; etc
does reveal such), or whether the insights gained arise out of considering those cards in such conjoined manner.