Bardic forms in the [i]Zohar[/i]

venicebard

Passages quoted here in bold are from the (1978) Soncino Zohar, in 5 volumes (of which I read 1 & ½ before tiring out this first time round), vol. 1. And...

They’re culled down from myriads of ‘hits’,
Not stretched out to manufacture ‘fits’.

Trees and sounds (from p.29): They continued their journey and reached a certain hill at sunset. The branches of the trees on the hill began to shake and rustle and broke forth into hymns. Whilst walking, they heard a resounding voice proclaim: ‘Holy sons of God, who are interspersed among the living of yonder world, ye who are the lamps of the Academy, reassemble into your places...

As an example for those who think the Zohar may not be relevant to tarot, on p.369 of v.1 is a passage that indicates 13 is the age of punishment and 20 the age of judgment, part of which runs: ...whereas in the human court, here below, the age of liability is reached at thirteen years, in the heavenly court it is reached only at twenty years. Included is discussion of death before and after 13: Said R.Eleazer: ‘If that be so, why should anyone be punished by dying before twenty? Before thirteen, it is true, he may die for the sins of his father, but why after thirteen?’

P.118 explains the suit of staves: R.Simeon... said: ‘It is written, “Close by the border shall the rings be, for places for the staves” (Ex. XXV, 27). The “border” is a secret place accessible only by one narrow path known to a few. It is, therefore, filled with gates and lit with lamps. This is the future world, which, being hidden and stored away, is called misgereth (border, lit. closed). The “rings” are the supernal chain of water, air, and fire [rising up beyond earth’s ‘ring’? VB], which are linked with one another and emerge from one another like so many rings of a chain. They all turn to the “border”, with which is connected that supernal stream which waters them, and with which they are thus connected. Further, these supernal rings are “places for the staves”, to wit, the lower chariots, of which some are from the side of fire, some of water, and some of air, so that they should be a chariot to the ark. Hence anyone who approaches should proceed only as far as the staves, but should not penetrate further, save those who are qualified to minister within, and to whom permission has been given to enter for that purpose.’

I quoted the above paragraph describing the Monad and its spokes (the suit of Staves) near entire (for which I beg Soncino Press’s forgiveness) to show the world what gems Zohar contains, however much ‘superstition’ one must wade through between ‘rays of light’ (henceforth, I shall make quotes more brief). The letter identifying the Monad is hinted at on p.214: AND NOAH WAS SIX HUNDRED YEARS OLD. Why is Noah’s age specified here? The reason is that if he had not reached this age, he would not yet have been qualified to enter the ark and become united with it. The Zohar identifies Noah’s ark with the ark, the box containing which I claim is pictured in mem-sofit (600), while intermediate mem numbers the days and nights it rained. Torah (meaning knowledge) is everywhere likened to water because it flows from above to below.

M-the-Monad’s being muin-the-vine and the trump VI L’Amoureux leads us to p.235: ”For thy love is better than wine” [SoS 1:2] to wit, than that wine which exhilarates and brightens... not the wine that intoxicates, induces rage, beclouds the countenance... and p. 236, further discussing the wine: And as here below, so is love awakened on high. For there are two lamps, and when the light of the one on high is extinguished, by the smoke that rises from the one below it is relit. In other words, there are two muin-the-vines, a higher one Aesop’s fox couldn’t reach, and a lower one (does familiarity breed contempt even in foxes?). And p. 286: Now there are above these seven [firmaments] a hidden firmament which guides and illumines them... designated by the interrogative particle Mi (Who)... Scripture says: “From the womb of Whom (Mi) came forth the ice” (Job XXXVIII, 29)... At the bottom again there is a firmament, the lowest of all, which has no light; and on that account the highest firmament joins with it in such a way as to insert in it the two letters of its own name, so that it is called Yam (sea), being, as it were, the sea of that highest firmament... Thus Mi, above the 7, becomes the first mother, complete with womb, and inserts herself into the lowest of the 7 (Cauldron’s libra: physicality, heredity) as Yam. I quote this even though it reverses what I have always said, that intermediate mem (as in Mi) is the lower, mem-sofit (as in Yam) the higher, this because water descending on humbled (prostrated) intermediate mem (worshiper, sinner) rained for 40, while the ark (box containing the exalted) demands 600 years: it at least shows we are not far apart. Either the Zohar is playing the game here of lapwing limping off leading predator away from the nest, or else there IS another sense in which greater mem can be seen as pouring out through her hole at the bottom INTO closed mem-sofit... but this I strongly doubt, as how would it get IN mem-sofit? Mem-sofit surrounds mem, surely: hence light that leaks out of the latter is never lost to the former, only to the vicinity of the present, which is man’s obsession, not God’s (higher self’s).

Stepping onto the Cauldron, p.352 quotes Prov. 12:19, The lip of truth shall be established for ever; but a lying tongue is but for a moment, which firmly fixes the level of the eternal to labials B and P, the lip of the Cauldron, and that of the ephemeral to the root of the tongue or Egg, guttural R.

On p.71, ...the foundation of the world, which therefore is called Kol (all), because it embraces the whole in the radiation of desire, the foundation being 9, 9 being coll-the-hazel: (p.83) Solomon, when he “penetrated into the depths of the nut garden”... took a nut-shell (klifah) and drew an analogy from its layers to these spirits which inspire sensual desires in human beings... I would only point out that in ‘embracing’ and ‘inspiring’, K is the feminine pole of the polarity K-G, feeling-and-desire, 9-10 (-1v/0n versus 0v/+1n, with v = ‘valencewise’ and n = ‘numerically’), passive and active aspects of the same ‘one who acts’: mixed in man, the one that predominates determines sex. [Actually, within the ‘one who acts’ they are yod and vav, which are -1v/-1n (19) and +1v/+1n (17) respectively, which is what the Name is all about (see below).]

A footnote on p.116 paraphrasing an omission says: Here follow some lines on the inner significance of the letters of the word tob, viz. teth, representing the ninth grade (from the end, i.e. Wisdom) vau, the heavens [vau is XVII L’Etoile], and beth, the two worlds [B is V LePape]. The footnote itself is based on Hebrew-numbering for these letters (e.g. vau=6 as 6 faces of cube of space, the ‘heavens’), yet the last two (and tet, if one take XXI LeMonde as an aspect of Sophia, wisdom) are here linked to the symbolism of their trumps (bardic letter-number symbolism), to which Hebrew numbering is ultimately subordinate. Continuing on this tack, early on (p.64), discussing the first word of Genesis, Bereshith, hit say: Afterwards the character of that temple was changed, and it was called “house” (bayith), relating B to ‘temple’. And considering that bardic B is 5 and U (vau) 5th-to-last (‘displaced’ from 5 itself by B, the quality of being ‘blessed with child’), p.87 says: ...the male rules by day... When night arrives, the female takes command, and she rules the house... Further it is written, AND THE STARS. As soon as the wife has given her orders and retired with her husband, the direction of the house is left to the maidens, who remain in the house... identifying stars (vau, ‘the heavens’) as maidens (one of them pictured in vau’s trump, XVII L’Etoile).

Concerning simples, I love translating numbers made-a-big-deal-of in Zohar passages into their Hebrew (or bardic) equivalents and discovering bardic ‘overtones’: (p.18) ...when a man expounds something new in the Torah, his utterance ascends before the Holy One, blessed be He, and He takes it up and kisses it and crowns it with seventy crowns of graven and inscribed letters, followed by a similar story involving seventy thousand worlds, 70 being ayin, bardic “O”. In other words, God says “O” (I love Jewish humor). In the second of these stories a hidden word of wisdom eventually enters into the eighteen mystical worlds, bardic 18 being Q, quert-the-apple: O and Q are 4 and 4th-to-last. Apple is a recurring symbol in the Zohar, as also in the ramblings of Myrddin the Wild (the second or later ‘Merlin’). The second story ends up with He takes that word and crowns it with three hundred and seventy thousand crowns, thus adding 300-shin to the mix, Hebrew replacement for the Logos-U, to which both O and Q have phonetic connexion, and O a deeper one as well (Logos-U is thinker and O that part of the mental breath that is in the doer’s atmosphere).

To show that such number references are what they seem, consider: (p.16) ...He strikes the three hundred and ninety heavens so they all quake and tremble [4b] before him: for her fate He sheds tears hot as burning fire, which fall into the great sea. Imagine the sound they make: tzaddi, 90, and shin, 300 (bardic Ss and S). Perhaps we see them in XVI LaMaisonDieu (S’s trump).

A very interesting little tale unfolds on p.24 (which I abridge): ‘The letter Yod waged war with the letters Kaph and Samekh, to make them join me. The Kaph refused to leave its place, since it could not exist for a moment elsewhere. The Samekh refused to move from its place lest it should cease to support those that fall. I’ll intersperse here that kaf and samekh are both involved in bardic quandaries concerning clinging to their stations. Kk (qof), kaf’s double, clings to kaf’s station virgo when the rest of the simples cancer-through-capricorn are derived from bardic vowels, the logical vowel (phonetically) for qof’s station being mother-letter alef, which is not a simple but stands, as its center, for the whole wheel of the simples. And samekh clings to its proper phonetic station at tip-of-tongue-or-Egg aries even when pagans replaced it with F (feh-sofit?) and used samekh’s written character for ogham Ng, at sagittary! The Yod... wept with me and said: ...I will come to thee and help thee and put thee in possession of two celestial letters superior to those that have departed, to wit the word Yesh (plentifulness), consisting of a celestial Yod and a celestial Shin... with the man telling the tale then being asked his habitation: ’My habitation is a good one and an exalted one for me – a mighty and imposing tower suspended in the air. In that tower there reside the Holy One, blessed be He, and a certain poor man,’ shin’s trump being XVI LaMaisonDieu.

Concerning the alef-bet as a whole, on p.110 it quotes SoS 3:9: The king Solomon made him a palanquin of the trees of Lebanon in which KJV gives “chariot” in place of “palanquin” so perhaps the original word connoted a conveyance in which one is seated (referring to the Merkabhah or holy throne-chariot), for in discussing the passage it says (p.111) ...and placed His chariot on twenty-two graven letters which were carved into ten utterances and affixed there. Hence it is written, ‘from the trees of Lebanon’. Then down the page a bit it says, Thus the one discharges and the other collects. Note it says “were carved into ten,” not “were grafted onto the ten as paths,” for the 22, in addition to being three distinct ‘Trees’ in their Hebrew numeration (1-9, 10-90, 100-900), are in their bardic numbering (the trumps) the descent and re-ascent of the 10 – not that we re-ascend but that they do, the 10 themselves (“the other collects” being the re-ascent) – namely I-X and XII-XXI, XI being the mirror or trampoline, and LeMat (H-chet-huath-hawthorn, the fence-barrier-hedge of the space-that-separates) the matrix in which it occurs. Or, if we take Lurianic teachings to heart, reflections 12-18 would break, falling down one to 11-17 leaving 18 to be Da’at [a possible interpretation seemingly corroborated by poetic polarities 10-ivy/11-holly, 9-hazel/12-oak, and 8-alder/13-ash, or rivalry, enmity, and the sexes respectively]. Yet the footnote on p.308 (v.1) says, i.e. of the Sefirah Malkuth, of which David’s throne was the counterpart below: David is one bardic name for D (the Boibel Loth or ogham name being Daibhaith), thus identifying XII LePendu as the ‘lower’ (needing to ascend) counterpart of Malkuth, 10.

This descent and re-ascent must correspond in some way to going straight out from Keter (1) as point whence emanate concentric spheres surrounding it as ‘garments’ (2-10), and on to the ‘Tree’ of the Keter (1) that is outermost or greatest and ‘zeroes in’ via the spheres of lesser size within it (2-10), the 10s coming into proximity somewhere in the middle. Both ways of describing Sefirot – 1-10 as growth, 1-10 as constriction, both ending in 10, us – are a commonplace of the Kabbalah, and trumps (letters) apparently (among other things) trace the path from the central Keter all the way to the surrounding Keter.

I've omitted anything much concerning the Name, hence this (p.75): The upper waters are male and the lower waters female... and this is the meaning of upper He and lower He. Modern dogma (Lurianic in origin, apparently) has it simply that both hehs are female, yod and vav male. Indeed, within the male part of the Name, yod-heh, is an active part, yod, and a passive part, heh, while within the female part of the Name, vav-heh, is an active part, vav, and a passive part, heh, but the first or upper heh is that of the male part of the Name and the second or lower heh that of the female part of the name, this being the part of the understanding that only survives to our own day in otherwise unexplainable passages like the above.

(End of first installment.)