"Lazarus is dead"
A point I try to illustrate with my brand of foolish banter concerns a common root of origin for both the selected iconography of Tarot and the use of symbolism & allegory in the ancient poetics of myth-making. A mathematical artifice underpinning the design of the early alphabets, well preserved in the arcane Judaic tradition of building mandalas with numbered letters.
Gaining a familiarity with this system’s architecture of symbolic continuities may not persuade many scholars of the influence played by Hebrew mysticism in the formulation of the Tarrochi, but it would at least provide an eye for recognizing how it came to bear upon the standardization of the Tarot. For, by the middle of the 17th century, the structure of the deck had been well adapted to the operations of this ancient mnemonic tool.
Did the market decide?
Long before the first Tarot card was ever painted, there were systems for partitioning and reassembling alphabets into a geometric mechanism for gaging the measure of time. The 22 letters of Hebrew function in this way to delineate a clockwork calendar and map of Earth wherein the Great “Mer” of Khnum-khufu serves as an axiomatic cornerstone for its’ construction.
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Independent of any assessment whether or when this system influenced the development of Tarrochi, Triumph or Tarot, this hidden use of letters is an esoteric practice that has exerted noticeable influence upon the formulation of symbol & allegory within the sacred art, text, and ceremonial traditions of those literate civilizations making use of a “Phoenician” alphabet. If, having evaded the purges of late antiquity, this secret knowledge most likely survived outside orthodox channels precisely due to its keepers avoiding explicit documentation. At least until a more “enlightened” age.
While the most obvious feature shared between this alephbetical art of memory and the 22 iconic cards of Tarot may be their sequence of numbers counted zero through twenty-one, it is not the only parallel exhibited between them. “Kesil”, astride the celestial equator, does make an apt cipher for decrypting our confusion of tongues, and as Osiris, in the form of Sah, he shares an intimate union with Sopdet, the brightest Star at -17º declination - a position which had allowed her helical rise to be marked from the latitude of ancient Kemet every 365.25 days. It takes 19 such years for the all the lunar phases of our moon to re-synch with the days of The Sun.
And though The Moon might at first appear a glaring discrepancy with the eighteenth letter from a Fool signifying nothing, it does reveal an enigmatic means of resonating with our Moon’s 346-day eclipse year. Rather than pair with one of the 7 double letters usually attributed the 7 “planets” visible to the naked eye, the Tarot Moon is matched to the last of the 12 simple letters,
qoph - commonly ascribed an affinity with the 12th zodiacal house, Pisces. Taken as a cue for reading “the measure of the Fish” at face value (2x √3 = 3.46), we find a link between systems meaningfully placing The Moon at a juncture allowing for the encryption of calendrical knowledge through the symbolic representation of a mathematical constant expressed with geometry.
Or, to try a different tack, we could explore the curious timing of the Roman orthodox feast for the Theban Martyrs, set on the 265th day of the year - a number indelibly wed to the
vesica piscis (265/153 ≈ √3) and a legend curiously counted at 6,666 decimated soldiers with a notorious centurion’s spear. This reliquary talisman, binding a Nail with a Prop, bears an almost emblematic relationship to the ill-fated King of Burgandy, Sigismund - patron saint of a Dragon Emperor and the Wolf of Rimini. His church in Cremona still marks the wedding chapel “of Force” (Sforza) with a "Powerful Lance” (Visconti) upon a door of six heraldic devices, including 3 interlaced rings possessing a unique relationship to those numbers and the Great Pyramid of Khnum-khufu at Giza. But, to appreciate this point of view, one must first begin to recognize how a puzzle whose solution rests in higher dimensions can be posed as projections unto a plane.
A perspective perhaps best admired by The Fool.
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