Saturday, March 16, 2013

A French method of reading the pip cards

This post has a subtitle: the French method comes head to head with the Golden Dawn in this post and wins!
Perhaps I'd better restate my position on tarot history: this is for my benefit, not yours, since if I'm not careful I'm about to lose handle on it & become a Marseille-only fanatic. My position is that tarot started off life as cards to play games, which attracted an esoteric meaning to themselves in the course of time. The meaning didn't have to attach to cards, it could havebeen to anything. There is also no single codified understanding of tarot divination, different schools in different places having had a go at it over the years, although the English-speaking world tends to be dominated by either the Golden Dawn or Crowley theories.
Cross the channel & you're in a divinatory different world. Even to search for tarot decks on amazon in its French, German or Italian forms comes up with different things, even decks meant for - can you believe it? - playing card games. The French-speaking cartomancy world is very different: Mdme Lenormand has become fashionable for us recently, but readings with Etteilla decks & Majors-only readings with Marseille-style decks haven't yet.
A popular French way of reading the pip cards - remember that this is meant to go with the Marseille deck & won't work so well with other styles - is called the "Majors in the Minors'. Trump I Bateleur 'governs' in some way the Aces, as being the ones. I personally really like this approach, having spent years making numerological connections within various tarot decks. But that is not what is meant by this approach: numerologically I want to move on to make connections with the higher-number Trumps. I'm bringing this approach out on its own because it will become apparent how well this approach works when compared (in a future post) to other numerological methods with the pips.
However today I came a cropper with this approach, caused by my. Love for making connections. I love the attributions of Hebrew letters, with their built-in meanings, to the Trump cards. I thought it would be interesting to apply these to this Majors-in-the-Minors approach & come up with Hebrew letters' meanings in the minors. The first snag was that I knew. Waite had changed two of the cards' positions for astrological reasons, but wasn't sure how this would impact on the Hebrew attributions.
Fortunately I wasn't at home when I thought about this, or I would have looked in my own notes, so googled it & found that the Golden Dawn attributions I had learned to go with the RWS deck are far from the only possible arrangement. Tarotpedia (http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Hebrew_Letters) gives seven.
It seems to me that what I had thought were the Golden Dawn attributions are not right. Not even for the RWS. This is why I needed to restate my position before starting: it seems to me that the Golden Dawn messed it up.
For a start the Fool is not the first card, it is unnumbered. Surely the point is that it is everywhere & before everything. In fact I feel the Fool is best treated as on its own, & the last place it should be is where MacGregor Mathers insisted on putting it, before The World (http://www.golden-dawn.org/documents_mathers_tarot.htm). Using the Filipas method of giving aleph to the Bateleur/Magician, which is the card with a number 1 on it, means the first Trump has the first Hebrew letter. Why didn't I notice this before? It's so obvious!
Mathers gives aleph to the Bataleur, which must be from Mathers himself, although the website is a Golden Dawn website. Best of all he points out a further justification for this in talking about The Bataleur:
'1. The Juggler or Magician. Before a table covered with the appliances of his art stands the figure of a juggler, one hand upraised holding a wand (in some packs, a cup), the other pointing downwards. He wears a cap of maintenance like that of the kings, whose wide brim forms a sort of aureole round his head. His body and arms form the shape of the Hebrew letter Aleph, to which this card corresponds. He symbolises Will.'
I had never noticed that his arms actually do that (even the 'wrong way round' in RWS), just as the brim of his hat becomes a figure 8. So frankly I'm sold on this now, & so what we're left with when all the shouting is over are the pip cards with Trumps & Hebrew attributions as below:
Aces: I Bateleur - Aleph, which means ox.
Twos: II Popess - Beth, which means house.
Threes: III Empress - Gimel, which means camel.
Fours: IV Emperor - Daleth, which means door.
Fives: V Pope - He, which means window.
Sixes: VI Lovers - Vau, which means nail.
Sevens: VII Chariot - Zain, which means sword.
Eights: VIII Justice (I.e. The one that Waite swopped for Strength) - Cheth, which means fence.
Nines: IX Hermit - Teth, which means snake.
Tens: X Fortune - Yod, which means hand.
If this seems rather far-fetched, get out a. RWS deck & marvel at the striking coincidence that there is a window in the 5 of Pentacles, the wands in the four of wands create a doorway to the castle in the distance, the man's hand in the 10 of swords is making the Japanese mudra, & the woman in the 8 of Swords is surrounded by a 'fence' of Swords.
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