Ordinal vs Cardinal value

jmd

Of interest in Kabalah is whether what may be of greater relevance is a letter's ordinal (first, second, ..., tenth, eleventh, etc) or cardinal (1, 2, 3, ..., 10, 20, etc) value.

This has special sinificance if one considers some of the Kabalistic claims and counterclaims which have been made for Hebrew-Atouts correlations - irrespective as to whether Alef is to be associated with the Bateleur/Magician, the World, or the Fool.

For myself, in terms of Atouts/Hebrew letter correlations, I consider the ordinal value of greater importance - after all, the twelfth letter has a (cardinal) value of thirty, and there are not thirty Atouts (nor thirty letters, for that matter).

If the ordinal value is considered of greater merit, this does not of course show that there exists an intrinsic connection between the Hebrew letters and the Atouts, but rather that comments against correlations based on cardinal value are irrelevent.
 

Ravenswing

number or letter

It's my belief that both of these are of equal importance. The manner in which I look at the glyphs depends on what I am relating them to.

I use the ordinal numeration when I am considering the set as individual letters. Here I see them as a set of 22 objects (or 27 if I have a reason to include finals, which doesn't happen often) that I can compare to other sets of 22 objects.
This is usually one-to-one corrospondences to the set of Tarot trumps.

One thing to remember is that, although there is an order to both of these sets, one need not match the first object in one set with the first object in the second set. One-to-one is simply that-- one object in set one is matched up with one object in set two. An interesting execise is to 'randomly' match the letter/trump series. Unless one has an a priori assumption that the order matters, all corrospondences are valid.

I use the cardinal values in gematric analysis. This happens to be my most frequent use of any numeration of the letters.


then again, this is only my personal angle....


fly well
Raven
 

Fulgour

jmd said:
Of interest in Kabalah is whether what may be of greater relevance is a letter's ordinal (first, second, ..., tenth, eleventh, etc) or cardinal (1, 2, 3, ..., 10, 20, etc) value.
Can you help me with a few examples (when you get back from the conference)?
 

Fulgour

Back to the Byzantines?

"The alphabetic system was used for ordinal as well as cardinal numerals, for dates (day of month; length of time), for money, for distances, and as numeral adjectives (first, second, etc.). To mark off the numbers 1-999, modern print uses a stroke above and to the right of the letters, for 1000 and higher a stroke below and to the left. (These conventions were acquired from Byzantine inscriptions.)"

http://www.fargonasphere.com/piso/numcode.html

It looks like I'll be doing some overdue homework...
 

Fulgour

Fulgour said:
"The alphabetic system was used for ordinal as well as cardinal numerals, for dates (day of month; length of time), for money, for distances, and as numeral adjectives (first, second, etc.). To mark off the numbers 1-999, modern print uses a stroke above and to the right of the letters, for 1000 and higher a stroke below and to the left. (These conventions were acquired from Byzantine inscriptions.)"

http://www.fargonasphere.com/piso/numcode.html
Good Golly! This site leads directly down the slippery slope. Yikes! I'm going to wait for rational guidance.
 

Ravenswing

double duty

fulgour--

Before the introduction of Arabic numerals, the glyphs of an alphabet did a double duty. In most, one glyph was both a letter and a number. Even English-- think of Roman Numerals.

Now, let's take the Hebrew alphabet (since it's the most common of the 'ancient' one used today), and consider the glyph called mem (for no particular reason).

The letter mem is the 13th letter of the alphabet; its ORDINAL value woud be 13. But the letters also have a numerical value beside there positioning. It is their CARDINAL value--the value of the glyph considered as a number. Mem is 40.

Hope this clears thing up...


fly well
Raven