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Alternative Religion/ Library /Book of Thoth
THE TAROT AND THE FORMULA OF TETRAGRAMMATON
What, then, are the Court Cards? This question involves another aspect of the system of development. What was the first mental process? Obliged to describe Nothing, the only way to do so without destroying its integrity was to represent it as the union of a Plus Something with an equivalent Minus Something. One may call these two ideas, the Active and Passive, the Father and Mother. But although the Father and Mother can make a perfect union, thereby returning to Zero, which is a retrogression, they can also go forward into Matter, so that their union produces a Son and a Daughter. The idea works out in practice as a method of describing how the union of any two things produces a third thing which is neither of them.
The simplest illustration is in Chemistry. If we take hydrogen gas and chlorine gas, and pass an electric spark through them, an explosion takes place, and hydrochloric acid is produced. Here we have a positive substance, which may be called the Son of the marriage of these elements, and is an advance into Matter. But also, in the ecstasy of the union, Light and Heat are disengaged; these phenomena are not material in the same sense as the hydrochloric acid is material; this product of the union is therefore of a spiritual nature, and corresponds to the Daughter.
In the language of the alchemists, these phenomena were classified for convenience under the figure of four "elements". Fire, the purest and most active, corresponds to the Father; Water, still pure but passive, is the Mother; their union results in an element partaking of both natures, yet distinct from either, and this they called 'Air".
One must constantly remember that the terms used by ancient and medieval philosophers do not mean at all what they mean nowadays. "Water" does not mean to them the chemical compound H2O; it is an intensely abstract idea, and exists everywhere. The ductability of iron is a watery quality.1 The word "element" does not mean a chemical element; it means a set of ideas; it summarizes certain qualities or properties.
It seems hardly possible to define these terms in such a way as to make their meaning clear to the student. He must discover for himself by constant practice what they mean to him. It does not even follow that he will arrive at the same ideas. This will not mean that one mind is right and the other wrong, because each one of us has his own universe all to himself, and it is not the same as anybody else's universe. The moon that A. sees is not the moon that B., standing by him, sees. In this case, the difference is so infinitesimal that it does not exist in practice; yet there is a difference. But if A. and B look at a picture in a gallery, it is very much not the same picture to both, because A's mind has been trained to observe it by his experience of thousands of other pictures; B. has probably seen an entirely different set of pictures. Their experience will coincide only in the matter of a few well-known pictures. Besides this, their minds are essentially different in many other ways. So, if A. dislikes Van Gogh, B. pities him; if C. admires Bougereau, D. shrugs his shoulders. There is no right or wrong about any matter whatsoever.
1Its magnetic virtue (similarly) is fiery, its conductivity airy, and its weight and hardness earthy. Yet, weight is but a function of the curvature of the "space.time Continuum": "Earth is the Throne of Spirit."
This is true, even in matters of the strictest science. The scientific description of an object is universally true; and yet it is not completely true for any single observer. The phenomenon called the Daughter is ambiguous. It has been explained above as the spiritual ingredient in the result of the marriage of the Father and the Mother; but this is only one interpretation.
THE TAROT AND THE ELEMENTS
The Ancients conceived of Fire; Water and Air as pure elements. They were connected with the three qualities of Being, Knowledge and Bliss, previously mentioned. They also correspond with what the Hindus called the Three Gunas-Sattvas, Rajas and Tamas, which may be translated roughly as "Calm", "Activity", and "Slothful Darkness". The alchemists had three similar principles of energy, of which all existing phenomena are composed: Sulphur, Mercury and Salt. This Sulphur is Activity, Energy, Desire; Mercury is Fluidity, Intelligence, the power of Transmission; Salt is the vehicle of these two forms of energy, but itself possesses qualities which react on them.
The student must keep in his mind all these tripartite classifications. In some cases, one set will be more useful than others. For the moment, concentrate on the Fire, Water, Air series. These elements are represented in the Hebrew alphabet by the letters Shin, Mem and Aleph. The Qabalists call them the Three Mother Letters. In this particular group, the three elements concerned are completely spiritual forms of pure energy; they can only manifest in sensible experience by impinging upon the senses, crystallising out in a fourth element which they call "Earth", represented by the last letter of the alphabet, Tau. This, then, is another quite different interpretation of the idea of the Daughter, which is here considered as a pendant to the Triangle. It is the number Ten suspended from the 7, 8, 9 in the diagram.
These two interpretations must be kept in mind simultaneously. The Qabalists, devising the Tarot, then proceeded to make pictures of these extremely abstract ideas of Father, Mother, Son and Daughter, and they called them King, Queen, Prince and Princess. It is confusing, but they were also called Knight, Queen, King and Princess. Sometimes, too, the Prince and Princess are called "Emperor" and "Empress".
The reason for this confusion is connected with the doctrine of the Fool of the Tarot, the legendary Wanderer, who wins the King's daughter, a legend which is connected with the old and exceedingly wise plan of choosing the successor to a king by his ability to win the princess from all competitors. (Frazer's Golden Bough is the authority on this subject.)
It has been thought better, for the present pack, to adopt the term "Knight", "Queen", "Prince" and "Princess", to represent the series Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, because the doctrine involved, which is extraordinarily complex and difficult, demands it. The Father is "Knight" because he is represented as riding on a borse. It may make it more clear to describe the two main systems, the Hebrew and the Pagan, as if they were (and had always been) concrete and separate.
The Hebrew system is straightforward and irreversible; it postulates Father and Mother from whose union issue Son and Daughter. There an end. It is only later philosophical speculation to derive the Father-Mother Dyad from a Unity manifest, and later still to seek the source of that Unity in Nothing. This is a concrete and limited scheme, crude, with its causeless Beginning and its sterile End.
The Pagan system is circular, self-generated, self-nourished, self-renewed. It is a wheel on whose rim are Father-Mother-Son-Daughter; they move about the motionless axis of Zero; they unite at will; they transform one into another; there is neither Beginning nor End to the Orbit; none is higher or lower than another. The Equation "Naught=Many =Two= One= All= Naught" is implicit in every mode of the being of the System.
Difficult as this is, at least one very desirable result has been attained: to explain why the Tarot has four Court cards, not three. It also explains why there are four suits. The four suits are named as follows: "Wands", attributed to Fire; "Cups", to Water; "Swords", to Air; and "Disks" ("Coins", or "Pantacles"), to Earth. The student Will notice this interplay and counterchange of the number 4. It is also important for him to notice that even in the tenfold arrangement, the number 4 takes its part. The Tree of Life can be divided into four planes: the number I corresponds to Fire; numbers 2 and 3, to Water; numbers 4 to 9, to Air; and the number 10 to Earth. This division corresponds to the analysis of Man. The number I is his spiritual essence, without quality or quantity; the numbers 2 and 3 represent his creative and trausmissive powers, his virility and his intelligence; the numbers 4 to 9 describe his mental and moral qualities as concentrated in his human personality; the number 6, so to speak, is a concrete elaboration of the number I; and the number 10 corresponds to Earth, which is the physical vehicle of the previous nine numbers. The names of these parts of the soul are: I, Jechidah; 2 and 3, Chiah and Neschamah; 4 to 9, Ruach; and lastly io; Nephesch.
These four planes correspond once more to the so-called "Four Worlds", to understand the nature of which one should refer, with all due reservations, to the Platonic system. The number I is Atziluth, the Archetypal World; but the number 2, as being the dynamic aspect of the number I, is the Practical attribution. The number 3 is Briah, the Creative World in which the Will of the Father takes shape through the Conception of the Mother, just as the spermatozoon, by fertilizing the ovum, makes possible the production of an image of its parents. The numbers 4 to 9 include Yetzirah, the Formative World, in which an intellectual image, an appreciable form of the idea, is produced; and this mental image becomes real and sensible in the number 10, Assiah, the Material World.
It is by going through all these confusing (and sometimes seemingly contradictory) attributions, with unwearying patience and persistent energy, that one comes at the end to a lucid understanding, to an understanding which is infinitely clearer than any intellectual interpretation could possibly be. This is a fundamental exercise in the way to initiation. If one were a shallow rationalist, it would be quite easy to pick holes in all these attributions and semi-philosophical hypotheses, or near-hypotheses; but it is also quite simple to prove by mathematics that it is impossible to hit a golf ball.
Hitherto, the main theme of this essay has been the Tree of Life, in its essence the Sephiroth. It is now proper to consider the relations of the Sephiroth with each other. (See diagram, p.268.) It will be noticed that twenty-two lines are employed to complete the structure of the Tree of Life. It will be explained in due course how it is that these correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It will be remarked that in some respects the way in which these are joined up appears arbitrary. Notably, there is an equilateral triangle, which one would think would be a natural basis for the Operations of Philosophy, consisting of the numbers 1,4 and 5. But there are no lines joining 1and 4, or 1and 5. This is not an accident. Nowhere in the figure is there an erect equilateral triangle, although there are three equilateral triangles with the apex downwards. This is because of the original formula "Father, Mother, Son", which is three times repeated in a descending scale of simplicity and spirituality. The number 1is above these triangles, because it is an integration of Zero and depends from the triple veil of the Negative.
Now the Sephiroth, which are emanations of the number 1, as already shown, are things-in-themselves, in almost the Kantian sense. The lines joining them are Forces of Nature, of a much less complete type; they are less abstruse, less abstract.
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