An alternative viewpoint
I have found the Kwaw-Filipas debate herein fascinating, I must admit. And the ordinal correlation with trump content given by Filipas is rather striking... but only on the surface. For would it not be fruitful to consider letters in a broader context, that of the evolution of ideas associated poetically with the sounds, as traceable through bardic tradition and the shapes of letters in various permutations of the alphabet, namely Egyptian-Semitic-Meroitic-tifinag-Libyan-runic-and-bardic? I realize this is a relatively unexplored field (except by me), so I shall briefly illustrate.
First, consider this: if the ordinal were paramount, would not “first” outrank “last”, rather than vice versa? I am of the decided opinion that it is the cardinal that is paramount in trumps, not the ordinal, and the only tradition that gives cardinal numbers to letters is the (Irish/Welsh) bardic: H-0, A-1, E-2, I-3, O-4, B-5, M-6, P-7, F-8, K-9, G-10, T-11, D-12, N-13, L-14, R-15, S-16 (U-17, Q-18, Ii-19, Ss-20, Aa-21, these last five my surmise but easily demonstrated to be correct). The problem remains to find the exact correlation with Hebrew and other alphabets, yet this not as difficult as it appears (though it took me more than a year to solve for Hebrew, as I recall). And that there is such correlation with Hebrew is demonstrated by its perching Ii (yod) the mistletoe or loranthus in mid-air (since it is rooted in a tree, not the ground).
Now, just taking some of the letters for which the Hebrew equivalents are obvious, consider first the letter lamedh. It does indeed, in all its forms, fit ‘Temperance’ perfectly: as goad, taming the animal in us, as both ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’, as the consonant of the left (the other non-nasal liquid, R, that of the right) in Indo-European (the warrior must train more with the left to strengthen it and create a balanced strength)—its early Semitic form showing both a goad and the left nostril (nose seen from the left, reysh as right nostril being a bit more subtle, since we also see it from the left, but I won’t go into that now). And its tree-name in the bethluisnion is luis the rowan, used to tame bewitched horses AND known to shelter young of many species, which often displace it when grown. And this latter meaning, then—which goes right along with teaching or instruction (what is a school if not a sheltered environment)—is apparent in its runic shape, which shows the part of a roof extending beyond the wall of a dwelling (shelter to other species besides man). It represents learning because rowan is the month immediately following birch or childhood (see below), which begins the bardic year. All in all, there is no gap between the evolution of meaning in the letter and the quality (temperance) portrayed in the trump. Indeed, since the L or rowan month in the tree-calendar encompasses the sign aquarius the water-pourer or water-carrier, we see both why the figure is pouring from one vessel to another (water-pourer) and why it has wings strapped to its shoulder-blades (where the water-carrier would hoist the beam holding the two vessels). And since in the closed zodiac (as opposed to the broken-and-extended one extending down the legs to the feet) aquarius occurs at the spine opposite the shoulders, we immediately can see that its square-Hebrew shape is that of the arms swinging while walking, seen from above... meaning the view the mother has of her child as it learns to walk. In other words, there is a definite THEME here. In tifinag it is an image of the low-German root for ‘like’ and shows two identical vertical strokes, learning being largely a discerning of like things. (In Egyptian it is the ‘recumbent lion’—rw, used for transcribing L in foreign words, a sound missing in Egyptian—indicating that the full moon is in leo during the rowan month I guess: an image of the original Sphinx, which was carved about the time the spring equinox was in leo—most likely to commemorate the inundation that destroyed civilization, its rain-eroded head then recarved into a human one in the time of Chefren evidently.) L is intimately connected with water: it is ‘lake’ in runic and ‘a wide flood on a plain’ in the Song of Amairgen (February fill-dyke, the most moist month in Keltic Europe, when people stayed indoors and studied their lessons), temperance being a leveling and aquarius a water-pourer. And it is by gazing into a lake that we learn our own likeness.
Consider beyt. B fits V LePape in every way conceivable. First, the old Semitic character can be seen to be a miter, which was worn only by the high priest. (It can also be seen as a pointy helmet, connecting it with 5’s planetary spirit, Mars, but that’s another story.) Second, its name’s meanings are ‘house’ as in ‘house or offspring of’ and ‘temple’, the latter the setting, the former the two diminutive figures presented there to be blessed. Third, its tree, birch, by its white bark signifies ‘blessing’, and also ‘birth’, the white of purity, of what is not yet corrupted (and also of course of bleaching, 5 being the atomic number of boron, whose ore is borax). And this meaning of ‘blessing’, of the uncorrupted, identifies its place in the tree-calendar, which is the year’s rebirth, capricorn the midwinter solstice, which in the zodiac in man is the direction straight back, whose poetic meaning is straight back towards self from other (i.e. the direction completely uncorrupted by other, by the world, this showing the basically Gnostic outlook being expressed). Fourth, we see that in runic as well as Greek and Latin (i.e. our B) it shows the pregnant torso in profile, connecting it firmly with the meaning ‘house or offspring of’ and the initial purity thereby implied... and calling our attention to the mother’s arm entering the trump from the right. I could go on, but I have made my point I think.
Each letter when viewed in this way fits its trump naturally and easily. Furthermore, once the correlations have been made, a deeper layer of meaning becomes apparent that gives substance to what has long been claimed for the Hebrew alef-bet: that it reflects the actual structure of the cosmos. For the atomic number of each letter ALSO happens to fit neatly the meaning thereof, further revealing a structural pattern that strikes to the heart of the atom-type’s (atomic ‘element’s’) significance to man, to chemistry, to particle physics (wherein it delineates for example the four particle types corresponding to the four elements, photons-leptons-mesons-baryons, and their spin, charge, and classification into bosons and fermions), to organic chemistry (life in general), and so on (showing for instance that potassium and sodium marshal fluids within and without the cell respectively, that oxygen is needed to remain upright, that oxygen-silicon-aluminum are the three most prevalent in earth’s crust, and on and on). It seems to me that such ‘byproduct’ or ‘side-effect’ reinforces the original meanings (rather than distracting from them, as Sophie seems to think), given the heretofore unsubstantiated claim for Kabbalah that it embodies a deep, profound, and powerful key to the cosmos.
To swerve back into the original topic of this thread (though I’m disputing, not rationalizing, the fool’s right to alef), H’s place in the round (the zodiac) explains completely why it is no-number or no-thing. First, as hawthorn, it separates things (being the hedge par excellence): one bardic epithet is ‘Guardian of Boundaries’. And what separates things? Space. LeMat is traversing space (wandering from town to town). And hawthorn’s place in the calendar (preceding the oak of midsummer) encompasses gemini, the sign preceding cancer or straight out (straight ahead, the breasts): cancer represents the horizon before (horizon without, once we realize straight back is the horizon within, being back towards self), so gemini is what is immediately above the horizon that MAKES it a horizon: space. Even the sound (as I mentioned earlier) indicates this, when compared with other sounds: it is a wind dissipating into space, space’s sonic indication (the ethereal). Its Hebrew equivalent, cheyt, is in square Hebrew an image of the shoulders-and-arms, gemini’s station in man (one’s arms reach out into space), while its old Semitic form shows a square passage blocked by a horizontal bar: its rune and our H both show a section of fence (again, that which separates or blocks), the rune’s name being ‘hail’, which blocks the growth of plants and forces the traveler to seek shelter, thus interrupting (blocking) his journey—indeed it was probably visualized as ‘materialized space’ (just thought of this). Hail also represents the trampling feet a fence or hedge is intended to keep out of one’s garden.
Finally alef. As ox, it is the power to lift (water for irrigation). Its hieroglyph is an eagle (Egyptian vulture), which rides thermals to great height. Its tree is ailm, silver fir, which surpasses all other trees in height and strives to do so by redirecting energy from lateral to vertical growth by limiting the lateral extent of its limbs. Indeed LeBateleur is one who gets our attention and uplifts us (which are the same thing), his greatest trick no doubt being levitation (the ‘Indian rope trick’). Its Greek form (our A) points up (delta does too, but this is more accidental and stems from its Phoenician form, a jib that swings like dalet the door), while the rune shows the trunk and two branches of the fir (and is called *ansuz or aes, ‘divine being’). Indeed LeBateleur lifts his rod, as if to draw the divine energy that makes us lift our eyes. One is the atomic number of hydrogen, which has the most lift of any atom type... and is the main constituent of the heavens (space isn’t a ‘constituent’, being nothing in and of itself). Furthermore, as the first vowel it stands for the fourth or vowel stave in ogham, which explains the missing fourth leg of the table, since this was the stave ‘missing’ from ogam consaine, its older (bronze-age) consonants-only form (found worldwide). But we can see that the leg isn’t really missing but rather hidden, just as vowels were amongst bronze-age bards (speech being impossible without them).
As for creation ‘skipping’ alef to begin with beyt, the fir stands behind the birch at midwinter solstice, the rebirth of the spirit of the year, just as the yuletide fir stands behind the children under it when we distribute gifts: it is the spirit that does the creating, while the children are the beginning of that creation.
PS. I intend to return tomorrow night and comment some on the Hebrew letter-names controversy, from the perspective of a non-Hebrew-speaker who owns a Hebrew dictionary, so if that would be inappropriate, in the words of the movie The Mask, “somebody stop me!”
