Basic Pathworking Q: Fool on Shin vs. Aleph

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.

First of all, welcome to the forums, Breakbeat_Mystic!

I am delighted to see a reference to Meditations on the Tarot, although mostly people respect the author's desire to be anonymous, even if this information is just a google search away. I found Meditations on the Tarot to be a profoundly spiritual text, and very fruitful for my own thinking on hermeticism. The afterword by Cardinal Von Balthasar is a good reference for any Roman Catholics who are uneasy about Tarot cards.

I believe both the Thelemic and GD arrangements have the Devil associated with Capricorn and Ayin on path 26.

I know very little about pathworking, except that they are visualizations/meditations of being in the appropriate region of the Tree, with appropriate colors, scents, symbolic figures, scenes (often Tarot inspired) and so on. Depending on what role ceremonial magick plays in your spirituality, there may be particular actions (the cabbalistic cross) or invocations associated with the meditation. I don't know how much we can talk about this thread being moved to the spirituality forum.

I don't have any experience with Fool associated with Shin. I am pretty much with the GD/Thelema consensus that the Fool is Air. My meditations on the tree have never been with it taking any other correspondence.

Cheiromancer said:

......I believe both the Thelemic and GD arrangements have the Devil associated with Capricorn and Ayin on path 26.......

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The Thelemic and GD path assignments for the trumps are identical except for the interchange of Star and Emperor.

Breakbeat_Mystic, what do you consider pathworking? Meditation on the cards in order (or reverse order) of their positions on the Tree? If so, are you certain that those who adopt something like the Levi ordering are taking pathworking into consideration? Or is that just your assumption?

I personally agree with Waite that the Levi assignments make no sense whatsoever. I also am receptive to Case's contention that Levi was too smart to be serious about his letter attributions. I am neither a GD initiate nor a Thelemite, nor do I have the inclination to try and untangle seemingly nonsensical systems. Since it is impossible to prove absolutely that one particular way is more 'correct' than another, I take the pragmatic approach and go with that which works for me.

LRichard said:

Breakbeat_Mystic, what do you consider pathworking? Meditation on the cards in order (or reverse order) of their positions on the Tree? If so, are you certain that those who adopt something like the Levi ordering are taking pathworking into consideration? Or is that just your assumption?

I personally agree with Waite that the Levi assignments make no sense whatsoever. I also am receptive to Case's contention that Levi was too smart to be serious about his letter attributions. I am neither a GD initiate nor a Thelemite, nor do I have the inclination to try and untangle seemingly nonsensical systems. Since it is impossible to prove absolutely that one particular way is more 'correct' than another, I take the pragmatic approach and go with that which works for me.

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I'm still taking much of this as something I'm too new at to offer solid judgments on. The Waite, Crowley, and Case way of looking at the cards is really all I have familiarity with.

Pathworking as far as I understand it is looking at the type of relationships that exist between the sephira. The claim occurs often that the sephira themselves are more objective realities whereas the experiences of the paths are more subjective albeit - just like the spheres - many people claim to relevant colors, symbols and tie-ins between each sephira that let you know if you're in the right space or drifting off. I'm mostly viewing pathworking at present as a way to learn about the tree of life and really infuse an understanding of it's applicability in daily life. I joined BOTA about a month ago so I'll be learning the Case system really well, but if there's another side to the story I'd like to have a sense of how to look at the philosophies that go into other common esoteric deck arrangements.

For now I prefer to stay to the paths below Tiphareth (so if I incorporate a card in meditation I'm going about as far up as Pei - the Tower), getting the details on the upper paths from Gareth Knight's Practical Guide was good information but for the most part I'm really just exploring Malkuth through Netzach and using the visualizations to both build my own internal pathways and exercise my visualization capacity.

Not sure what to say on Waite's comments toward the Levi system aside from that I read them as well and they make sense in extract, but so often people will throw arguments and counterarguments at this stuff - without years of experience too many things can sound cogent when viewed on their own. I get the feeling that experiencing the realities of the tree of life will be the most helpful part of the process, ie. to see what gels with me as well as to see whether the tarot, letter, or word assignments mean all that much along the paths.

As for whether or not people are using the Levi system for pathworking - that's why I'm asking, I have no idea. The only reason I get that impression is that looking at things like the Masonic tarot I see some very symbol-rich esoteric decks that still go by Levi's organization. The gap between the alphabetical assignments and the level of detail on some esoteric decks has me wondering what they're doing. Reassigning 21 cards to different paths needless to say is a pretty big change up.

LRichard said:

The Thelemic and GD path assignments for the trumps are identical except for the interchange of Star and Emperor.

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The interesting thing about the Star/Emperor switch is that Gareth Knight claimed it to be a switch everyone agreed with - it didn't appear in the Waite or BOTA decks because they were built before there was consensus on the move, Crowley was perhaps one of the first to formalize it into his deck. That raises the question I suppose why there haven't been many updated releases by the major players, tarot seems to still have some evolution in it's surprising to see organizational lines still defined by decks made in the early 20th century - particularly if they agree with subsequent changes.

Breakbeat_Mystic said:

The interesting thing about the Star/Emperor switch is that Gareth Knight claimed it to be a switch everyone agreed with - it didn't appear in the Waite or BOTA decks because they were built before there was consensus on the move, Crowley was perhaps one of the first to formalize it into his deck. That raises the question I suppose why there haven't been many updated releases by the major players, tarot seems to still have some evolution in it's surprising to see organizational lines still defined by decks made in the early 20th century - particularly if they agree with subsequent changes.

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The switch also apparently did not happen in the Golden Dawn Tarot, The Golden Dawn Magical Tarot, or the Hermetic Tarot. The original reason for moving the Star off of Path 28 is the revelation by Aiwass that Tzaddi is not the Star. Crowley reasoned that the issue could be satisfactorily resolved by moving the Star to the Heh Path and the Emperor to the Tzaddi Path. The most recent GD deck which I cited is the Cicero deck, and Tzaddi is still the Star, and Heh the Emperor. It seems strange that Knight would make that statement, unless the consensus was arrived at sometime after 2001.

LRichard said:

It seems strange that Knight would make that statement, unless the consensus was arrived at sometime after 2001.

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It looks like the language he used wasn't quite that strong. A couple key paragraphs from the Greater Arcana chapter in vol. 2:

Gareth Knight - A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism Vol. 2 said:

There is one change in the traditional attributions however since first they became generally known. This change is the transfer of Trumps IV and XVII, The Emperor and The Star, and is a modification put forward by Aleister Crowley. Crowley is, in many respects, the black sheep of the modern esoteric family but he knew his Qabalah. While a change in magical tradition of this nature should be regarded with great circumspection, and examination of all the factors involved seems to indicate that Crowley was right. Hence the change has been followed in this book

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... said:

It may be asked - if the traditional attribution was wrong (Star/Emperor) - why it should not have been spotted before, by Crowley or MacGregor Mathers and his associates, or subsequently by other commentators following the Golden Dawn tradition. The answer to this is that the change s quite a subtle one. The incorrect placing of Strength and Justice was obvious and so they were counterchanged quite empirically. It was assumed that the numbering of the Tarot cards had become distorted. The counterchanging of The Star and The Emperor is less obvious, particularly as they counterchange onto parallel Paths on the same side of the Tree, so that one is an analogue at a different level of the other. Indeed a fair case could be made for retaining the traditional Golden Dawn attributions though the Yetziratic Texts and Esoteric Titles seem to support the change.

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So yeah, you're right that if later renditions of the packs came out without that transition there's a fair chance that both Crowley and Knight shared a minority opinion on the matter (or they may consider it to cause more confusion than it's worth).

Breakbeat_Mystic said:

That raises the question I suppose why there haven't been many updated releases by the major players, tarot seems to still have some evolution in it's surprising to see organizational lines still defined by decks made in the early 20th century - particularly if they agree with subsequent changes.

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Tarot history moves quite slowly, with gaps of about two hundred years between significant ideological developments. That it was the beginning/middle of the 20th century is also important, in that occult revolutions mirrored the profound changes in human society.

If you are with B.O.T.A., you had better stick with their system of correspondences. If you become convinced that their letters are off (say, that the Star and the Emperor should trade places on the tree, or something) then it will be much harder for you to immerse yourself in that system. You'll see a star card and a little voice inside you will proclaim "Tzaddi is not the star!"