Kabbalah: Fool=Shin ~ Why?

Fulgour

Kabbalah: Fool=Shin ~ Why?

Many thinkers have chosen to place The Fool between 20 and 21,
but give it no number, and assign it the alpha-numeric letter Shin.

Is this done to give "closure" to the alphabet, rather than leave it
open-ended, which is the natural "conclusion" of the sequence?

Aleph leads to Taw leads to Aleph, in a natural and organic way,
but perhaps in order to force the abstract Kabbalah designations
there must be a physical end to the structure, a man-made stop.

Since the earliest written associations, The Fool is made '21' Shin.
What purpose does this serve? What problem does it solve? Why?
 

Rusty Neon

Shin = Tooth

Art and Arcana, Ronald Decker, pp. 48-49:

In his Rituel de la Haute Magie, Éliphas Lévi makes an original attribution of letters to trumps. [...] Lévi unexpectedly places the Fool second to last, before the World.

Perhaps Lévi wanted the series to end with something rather than a foolish vagabond. Or perhaps we should attend to the penultimate letter, Shin. As a noun, shin means "tooth." This is suitable for the Tarot de Marseille, in which the Fool suffers the bite of a dog (or a lynx in Wirth's version). Paul Christian, another follower of Lévi, gave the tarot trumps an Egyptian mystique and imagined the Fool as threatened by a crocodile, chosen partly for its potential display of teeth.
 

jmd

I personally suspect that Levi followed the placing of the cards in their gaming version, in which the players order their Atouts in sequence, save that the Fou is never placed last - the only position it can be lost if placed.

I remember as a young boy my own gambling father being quite strict about this (as well as the sequence of suits arranged in one's hand).

Of course, it may be other grounds that Levi had, and that the gambling ordering is a later 'tradition', but personally suspect Levi simply followed suit (excuse the pun), any specific Hebrew letter correspondence being lost by the time he looked at the cards (assuming, of course, that such was incorporated within the Atouts).
 

Fulgour

is it necessary

Since I have yet to succumb to the delusional allure of Golden Dawn
attributions (22 wrong out of 22), but do at times ponder those more
promising possibilities of such people as Oswald Wirth on Kabbalah,
Shin for The Fool strikes me as preposterously capable of being right.

But this is only when it comes to Kabbalah, so my question remains:
Is there something necessary about placing The Fool '21st' with Shin?
 

jmd

There is nothing that is 'necessary' about it in my personal opinion, but it does make a lot of sense, and for many years preferred this (if any) attribution (which Waite also, incidentally, placed both in his book, and a small letter on the tunic of the Fool was drawn by Colman Smith - and adopted also by BOTA).

By having the World as final card, one gets a wonderful Platonic association of the Soul of the World on the Cross (Tav).

Nonetheless, this allocations, though they also work at this symbolic level, do not seem to carry as much natural weight as placing the Fool as un-numbered and as the final in the sequence (for myself at any rate).
 

Fulgour

outside in (inside out)

jmd said:
By having the World as final card, one gets a wonderful Platonic association of the Soul of the World on the Cross (Tav).
Besides the Soul of the World on the Cross, is there something about
linking the last letter to the now last card, by so making The Fool an
internal element of the construct, rather than an un-numbered final?