no matter how you spell it, it's still

Ravenswing

Axiom 1—reality is comprised of number and letter.
Axiom 2—the Tree of Life is a blueprint of reality.
Axiom 3—Kabala, Tarot and Astrology form an integrated system by which reality can be examined.

These are my basic precepts. I use the Ari’s variant of the tree of life. There are two basic reasons for this. The first deals with the Lightning Flash. As it decends, it goes from Understanding to Mercy. I don’t believe that this primal pathway vanishes. The second deals with the paths that connect Victory and Splendor with the Kingdom. I believe that manifestation comes from the center pillar only. There must be a stable Foundation to enter the Kingdom.

Gematria is my tool in the analysis of reality.

I started my gematric studies using Hebrew as the alphabetic basis. I read through the Sepher Yetzirah, Crowley’s 777, Godwin’s Cabalistic Encyclopedia and Hulse’s The Key of it All. I totaled up words, analyzed and contemplated. I could feel the depth, but I could not find it.

Then I came across this from Mathers translation of The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage:

“Let us then walk in the right way, let us speak before God with heart and mouth alike opened, in our own maternal language, since how can you pretend to obtain any Grace from the Lord, if ye yourselves know not what ye ask? Yet, however, the number of those who lose themselves utterly in vanity is infinite; many say that the Grecian language is more agreeable to God, it may be true that it was perhaps at one time, but how many among us to-day understand it perfectly, this is the reason why it would be the most senseless thing to employ it.”

I started from scratch using American English, my maternal tongue.

Big problem. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, twenty-two paths on the tree. I couldn’t justify adding any pathway. The Tree is the Tree—not to be tampered with.

There’s one large difference between the alph-bet and the alphabet. The alphabet has vowels built into the system. As I see it, vowels are the identity principle for English words. Take a group of consonants. Let’s use THR. By placement of vowels we can get ‘there’, ‘three’, ‘their’, ‘other’.

Similarly, I see the Fool as the identity principle in Tarot. S/he goes on hir Journey, and by hir interaction with reality, the trumphs are experienced. So I relate the Fool to the set of vowels and place hir on the path between Foundation and the Kingdom. The path of manifestation.

And hey! There’s 21 consonants…

More to come

fly well
ravenswing

Lleminawc

Ravenswing said:
Big problem. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, twenty-two paths on the tree. I couldn’t justify adding any pathway. The Tree is the Tree—not to be tampered with.

Here's an interesting aside.

String theory originally posited 26 dimensions of spacetime, which have now been whittled down to 10. Coincidence? Probably.

Ravenswing

no such thing as coincidence--at least not in my personal framework of reality. tis synchronicity.

Greg Stanton

Ravenswing said:
Axiom 1—reality is comprised of number and letter.

No. Reality exists separate from our experience of it. We can interpret reality by assigning numbers and letters to its various aspects. These "correspondences" vary depending on our paradigm. They can enrich our understanding of the world, but more often they limit our experience of reality by forcing it into a rigid set of beliefs.

Ravenswing said:
Axiom 2—the Tree of Life is a blueprint of reality.

No. It is a diagram that outlines a singular philosopy's understanding of the act of creation.

Ravenswing said:
Axiom 3—Kabala, Tarot and Astrology form an integrated system by which reality can be examined.

No. Kabala, Tarot and Astrology can form an associated system by which reality can be interpreted. They only become integrated if you choose to see them as such.

venicebard

Ravenswing said:
Axiom 1—reality is comprised of number and letter.
Axiom 2—the Tree of Life is a blueprint of reality.
Axiom 3—Kabala, Tarot and Astrology form an integrated system by which reality can be examined.

I agree (that is, if Axiom 1 were to read 'number, letter, and geometry'), though there is much more to Kabbalah than is currently published, and correspondence between letters and trumps certainly should be based on the tradition current when-or-before tarot sprang up, i.e. the bardic, not on the more modern speculations of self-styled mystics. It is Axiom 3, of course, that is mainly in dispute in these parts.

I use the Ari’s variant of the tree of life. There are two basic reasons for this. The first deals with the Lightning Flash. As it decends, it goes from Understanding to Mercy. I don’t believe that this primal pathway vanishes. The second deals with the paths that connect Victory and Splendor with the Kingdom. I believe that manifestation comes from the center pillar only. There must be a stable Foundation to enter the Kingdom.

You make a great deal of sense here. But there is a factor that you might not have taken into consideration: Lurianic Kabbalah calls the Tree when considered in the context of the Name the 'Tree of Return', which implies there may be two distinct distribution of paths, one descending and one re-ascending. I say this because there is some reason to suspect the tradition of letter-paths preserved in today's Hermetic Cabala may indeed be authentic and date from the 12th century, when Judaic and Keltic lore had a chance to meet and cross-correlate in Provence-Languedoc. Anyway, keep an open mind on this if you can, for the jury may still be out.

Of course, one thing seemingly ignored in modern-day Kabbalah is that there are four configurations of the Tree itself, one for each world. In the first (described in the Bahir), each Sefirah is individual and derives its character directly from the round: for instance, 4 is Lovingkindness because the fourth sign on the round, since one starts with aries or up, points straight out, towards other, the 10th, then, being arrival at straight back or in, meaning an individual self, since the early Kabbalah stated that the Tree leads from ain, 'naught' (naught having yet differentiated itself from 1, the totality), to ani, 'I', meaning the individual. Though it is spoken of as God's individuation, what can this mean but the existence of individual selves, especially since the meaning is so plain: from the one Totality to the ten-fingered?

In the second, then, they get paired up, as described in Sefer Yetzirah: first-last, good-bad, up-down, east-west, south-north. In the third, they form three triads, as in the standard diagram. And in the fourth, the four elementary types as manifested in the planetary cycles determine the structure, which turns out to be but a slight distortion of the fundamental structure in number, namely that in the context of digital sums it progresses 1, 2, 3, 4, -4, -3, -2, -1, -0, and 1 again, that is, the elements, their reflections, the reflection of space or no-thing (zero), followed by endless repetition of the above. (The slight distortion sets in at 7, where the passive side of the watery layer begins, but that's another story.)

Gematria is my tool in the analysis of reality.

Warning: according to Gershom Scholem (and I concur), Gematria is not Kabbalah, its use therein arising not from the main current but from the influence of the Ashkenazi Chasidim.

I started my gematric studies using Hebrew as the alphabetic basis. I read through the Sepher Yetzirah, Crowley’s 777, Godwin’s Cabalistic Encyclopedia and Hulse’s The Key of it All.

This last source gives the number correspondences of the bards, which are provably the correct ones regarding the original tarot (i.e. Tarot of Marseilles). Those given yield numerical order H=0, then A E I O B M P F K G T D N L R S, and the remaining correlations (undoubtedly kept secret) are obviously U Q (or KK) Y (or II) St (or SS) and AA. The II or Y is yod the mistletoe (which does not extend down to the line or ground like the rest), and AA turns out (by process of elimination) to be teyt or theta. You may find this solves the problem of applying things to English, more or less.

Personally, I don't place much stock in Mathers, but you probably would rather not hear that, huh.

There’s one large difference between the alph-bet and the alphabet. The alphabet has vowels built into the system.

The vowel-equivalents in Hebrew are not hard to find, mostly. Greek tells us A is alef, E is heh (i.e. epsilon), O is ayin (omicron), and U is vav (upsilon). The I is a problem, in that yod/iota is obviously II/Y the mistletoe: the solution is that zayin is bardic I, for zeta is the initial of Zeus because of erosion of D by I or Y, and runic has two I-sounds, one a vertical line called 'ice' (picturing an icicle), the other a Z altered to eliminate horizontals (since they were carved across the grain of wood) called 'yew', which is the bardic tree-letter I or yew. The AA, then, is a dental consonants in all but bardic, namely teyt, or theta, the rune 'day', its early Semitic and Greek form being a crossed circle, symbol of earth and the equator, for its tree, according to Robert Graves's learned speculation (also the source for Y being mistletoe), is the palm tree: he bases this on what he claims is a second meaning understood for A-fir's name ailm (namely palm). Since yod being mistletoe is obvious from its not coming down to the line on which one writes, I take his speculation seriously with regard to AA also, as it certainly fits perfectly with teyt's form and its rune's name ('day' is the cycle whose round is the equator).

As for the Fool, one of the reasons to adopt bardic numeration rather than Hebrew-Greek is that the former has a no-thing or zero, namely H, which is Hebrew cheyt (Greek eta or heta, Latin H).

Okay, I'll shut up now.

no matter how you spell it, it's still

Ravenswing

Lleminawc

Ravenswing

Greg Stanton

venicebard