The Bardic Vowels
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[edit] THE BARDIC VOWELS
Having sent R to the center to cool off, and thence to his original station at the bottom, we have brought the year to a close on a high note instead: the failings of the antihero are turned around through initiation, the loose ends of his discomfiture tied off in the useful knot of a deeper understanding. Next, we embark upon the vowels—that is, the letters that were originally the seven bardic vowels but which have become consonantized to varying degree in other alphabets related to the bardic current. The vowels represent the breaths: there are four outer breaths, those of the elements, and three inner ones, those of the three parts of the self. The inner breaths correspond ultimately to the three forms of mana or vital force in the Huna tradition, those of the High, Middle, and Low selves. But because of the Fall, the doer-creator being in a state where the forms created bind rather than liberate, breaths of thinker and knower are not experienced fully, only that part of them within the doer’s third wheel, the Egg. So while alef, the A of the Logos, is still the breath of the doer, the breaths of the thinker and knower within the doer’s atmosphere (the Egg) get reduced down near the ‘duration’ of the fleeting present instant, where the doer is trapped (by its blindness to what is within). The thinker’s U, as the finite duration of the Word (whose creative beginning is A), yields them up in the form of its start and end, transition from doer to thinker and from thinker to knower. These are O-ayin and U-vav, respectively. Indeed these two are on the manifested air (life) and fire (light) levels of the Egg, the levels associated with thinker and knower respectively, but on the nature side rather than within, since the doer’s thoughts direct Light towards objects of nature, rather than focusing on self-knowledge. Inadequacy of the outward-facing doer alone to regulate behavior in the present is the reason, methinks, for A’s being unable to remain at both the center of the Egg and its virgo, its station in the vowel spectrum spanning the tongue-root (Egg’s bottom half), where it has been replaced by the choking sound qof.
The Trumps associated with the bardic vowels are closely geared to the ancient meaning of lunar phases and pagan practice, and if I had not read quite a bit in Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, its underlying gender-paradigm might have evaded me. But before we start on the rest of the Trumps, consider for a moment the distribution of sounds in our universe of wheels or worlds. Looked at from the point of view of the preparation of elixirs or ores, either one—Brigit, for instance, having been a threefold goddess of poets, smiths, and healers—we see clearly that while the bubbling pops and gurgling growls of the Cauldron are appropriate to preparations therein, the closed vessel contains in its upper half the fizzes and other gaseous or turbulent consonant sounds one would associate with that part, and in its lower half the degrees of heat placed under it to produce said fizzings, these last representing both the antihero’s howls of suffering and our own howls of delight and derision (of what is being satirized). And with that...
[edit] THE VOWEL-TRUMPS
These shall be presented in the order of their associated lunar phases, as best as can be ascertained (that is, with respect to the somewhat ambiguous Aa or teyt), but it shall also be remarked, of course, which breath each one is (which in the case of teyt is not ambiguous at all).
[edit] I Le Bateleur
I LeBateleur is A-ailm, the silver fir. This, like the juggler, is rooted in the notion of levitation: it devotes its entire energy to height, limiting lateral growth of limbs to redirect energy aloft. Alef as ‘ox’ (whose head its proto-Canaanite form pictures) turns the pumps lifting water from the water table to the surface for irrigation in the arid Middle East. And its corresponding Egyptian hieroglyph (Semitic letters having derived from the hieratic forms of hieroglyphs, according to 19th-century scholarship) is the eagle or Egyptian vulture, which rises to great heights by spiraling up thermals. This card pictures him who lifts our eyes, gains our attention—unifies and focuses his audience. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this card is the ‘missing’ (hidden) fourth leg of his table: this stands, I am absolutely certain, for the missing fourth ‘leg’ of ogam consaine, namely the vowels, A being the first of these. The rune shows the fir’s down-turned branches and is called ‘divine being’ or ‘god’ (I think this of the fir myself). The shape of square-Hebrew alef, while no doubt related to the bull or ox, also strongly suggests the spiraling upward that one sees in the eagle’s soaring, or in a ‘pillar of dust’ perhaps (such as accompanied Israelites on their trek through the desert). This is the creative beginning of the Word and invokes for us the Yule season, the time of the birth of the year. Yet the only duality in it (unlike XVIIII LeSoleil or V LePape) is between appearance and reality, brought about by the doer’s sleight-of-hand: the fallen doer-creator continually throws up a smokescreen of thoughts to hide from its own culpability. For alef does not actually stand specifically for the Yule season where the twins meet but for the center of the round that unites these twins into a single process, human action, from which position it just happens to mark off Yule’s height (halfway up the return to the source). In the Logos, it evokes the fire triad—the triad pointing up, like flame or the fir itself—and fire, the first of the elements, is that which unifies, as alef’s number is Unity in both Hebrew and bardic numeration: it bears the number pointing to ‘number one’, where karma says the buck stops. As the vowel of the newly or first-appearing (hence its number) crescent moon—the horns of alef’s ox—it is a male image, this because in pagan times a male child was weaned during the waxing phase, that he might grow to be a stout warrior. Alef as doer-creator, or breath thereof, practices sleight-of-hand on himself, yet it has vast consequences, as this is hydrogen, which constitutes most matter we know of. This atom-type, being merely a proton and an electron either bound together or torn apart to make plasma (gas of charged particles), stands for the very electrostatic field whose flux produces the magnetic pinch between parallel plasma currents that is the cause of a galaxy.
[edit] IIII L’ Empereur
IIII L’Empereur is O-onn, the furze or gorse, standing for the furze fires of spring: burning away the tough parts to bare fresh shoots for sheep to eat in the sign of the ram or aries. This is waxing or increase and so, again, a male figure (part of the period for weaning same) but moreover the very ruler of the elements, as determined by its number, which is in turn determined by the sequence 4-8-16-0 (this vowel followed by spring’s months, or O-F-S-H), wherein spring increases (4-8-16), then vanishes (-0), or more specifically wherein it sacrifices itself for its kind (flowers, then withers, having sent forth the pollen seen trickling down in XVI LaMaisonDieu). As vowel of spring, it shows the ruler out campaigning, not ‘at court’. Yet the place its sound gives it on the Egg is leo, the middle of summer: what gives? I hoped you would ask: this, the hottest month of the year, represents the closed vessel’s being placed over heat, on application of which the mercury column, of which O-ayin is the (heated) floor, flies up to take over the upper half of the outer vessel as volatile mercury’s vapor, the bardic and Hebrew 8s expanding the top of its column to make of it a shape reminiscent (when whirled about the vertical axis, calculus-like) of the mushroom, or a tree filling out in spring, or the circumcised phallus (‘pillar of Hermes’). It could also be a hoisting of sail in the early stages of a voyage, taking Egg as vessel also in that sense. In other words, this is the vowel that must find a way to rule its domain of spring, at the top of the Egg, from a roost somewhere in its bottom half, where all the vowels must reside in this scheme (at the tongue-root), and it indeed succeeds in doing this: it is the heat engine of the year, teleologically drawing spring to itself each time round by the fact that it is the warmth towards which spring tends. It is the circulatio, the moving wheel in which we see no spokes, in proto-Canaanite (ayin), Greek (omicron), and Latin (our O). The quartered globe on the monarch’s sceptre signifies that once earth arrives, all four elements are present, since earth arrives in the fourth place. As the mental breath in the fallen doer-creator, this is the circulation of thoughts going round and round till acknowledged as one’s own and the Light bound up in them freed, thus dissolving them (thereby reducing our smokescreen obscuring the truth). As this circulation of thoughts, O determines nature’s shape—rules the four elements—because it determines destiny’s shape: matter builds out the lines in each and every thought while yet remaining mere matter (all is not idea, merely shaped by idea). The atom-type here, beryllium, is what makes possible the beryl (emerald, aquamarine) the emperor wears on his chest (near his station of leo-the-heart).
[edit] XVII L’ Etoile
XVII L’Etoile is U-ura, summer’s heather, and thus stands for love’s consummation under the stars, apparent from her being naked and mixing together two fluids, as in conception, which is why the bird-soul is waiting over on its tree: conception requires the presence of the soul whose body it is to be. This vowel signifies coming of age, the full moon: its number was the age of consent in ancient Ireland, and its rune, called ‘aurochs’, shows the horn of this beast upturned as drinking-horn, its acquisition making one a full-fledged warrior. Aha, you say, why is this not a male image, this completion of the waxing half of the lunar cycle? Here is where having read Grimm with care helps: the full moon is reckoned with the waning half (the weaning of women), while the dark is reckoned with the waxing, for they deteriorate immediately into these. So this is where one can begin to wean a girl child, here where the moon turns round to decline in size thus presaging her growing up into a slender and beautiful maiden. Its station, as vowel of summer, is the summer solstice, the sign cancer-the-breasts, which is why this is the only one of the twenty-two that shows a decent set, those in XXI LeMonde looking almost pasted-on. This is the proto-Canaanite breast pouring forth milk, as indeed she is pouring from her ‘jugs’. Yet since this atom-type is chlorine, one would think that what she is actually doing is pouring some in her pool, though the hydrochloric acid formed in one’s body does aid the digestion of the protein in mother’s milk. This letter is fifth-from-the-end, and U (V) was Roman numeral five. It is the noetic breath in the doer, and here again there is an association of Light—which comes to us from the knower—with sexual function—‘coition’, surely, among the twelve functions Sefer Yetzirah lists in jumbled order for the simples—just as in the ‘leaking’ intermediate mem and in the other meaning of ‘to know’: vav represents Light we bind to objects of nature in creating the thoughts that become our destiny, for its sign points to the outer horizon.
[edit] XXI Le Monde
XXI LeMonde is Aa-ailm, this time meaning palm, symbolizing tropical climbs, hence location, location, location: location is everything (not really). Even its atom-type, scandium, first of the rare earth metals, is named for the location at which it was found, and it naturally falls to the bottom (being the heaviest atom-type of the first twenty-one) in the phonetic order of vowels across the tongue-root, its sign pointing straight down: libra or manifested earth (surface contact), one’s geographical or physical location. The palm is associated with the phoenix (whence Phoenicians?), the magical bird reborn in flame: this means it is the fire breath. One’s breath is one’s link to ‘other’, the sign pointing towards which is cancer (pointing straight out or ahead). Therefore, when a nature unit’s movable wheel has its aries or head in cancer or manifested fire, its own cancer is here in the libra of the fixed wheel or world it is in. In Adam Qadmon, no doubt the elements are dealt with at their locations on the fixed wheel itself, that is, in their respective manifested signs on the nature side of that ideal Form, or cancer through libra. But in the fallen, weakened Adam (us), the elementals force their own perspective onto the doer, their breaths manifesting where their movable cancers point, namely signs libra through capricorn, thereby taking over for the use of nature the lower half of the spine Jachin, the column behind or within which should ideally therefore be for the use of the complete self, with nature utilizing the front column. The takeover occurs because the part of the front column Boaz that should be their stations has been broken off to allow for the womb’s enlargement, hence those stations must be rebuilt before the breaths can return there, and this is part of the goal of the Great Work (alchemy). That Aa here stands for the fire breath and thus for a movable wheel oriented as I have explained is proved by XXI LeMonde itself: the four creatures surrounding the wreath enclosing the dancer reference the four signs taurus-leo-scorpio-aquarius and are oriented such that their aries must point to our left. Aa’s Semitic equivalent, by process of elimination, is teyt, which in square Hebrew shows the legs folded under one while seated in meditation. That teyt’s proto-Canaanite form signifies location is obvious from its being shaped like our modern-day heliport sign: a crossed circle, meaning the stopped wheel whose spokes can be seen, this stoppage by itself being sufficient to signify location. Its rune signifies also a location in time, evidently, as it is an hourglass on its side (instant of being turned over), named ‘day’: this was apparently the last rune, the rest pouring their influence into it, as if into the present. The number symbolizes that which crowns or comes after honest combat (two full sets of ten digits unfettered by treachery), namely victory (to the victor goes the world), and Aa got this number because it is first when counting from the end, just as A is first when counting from the beginning. Aa does not really refer to a distinct phase of the lunar cycle, except inasmuch as after the A-O-U of waxing to full we must go back to the middle, A, to sprout off in the opposite direction towards E-I-Ii, so Aa must be this second A, this second start from the center of the vowel spectrum branching this time towards the front vowels and waning phase. It thus comes between U and E and for this reason presents to us a female central figure, consistent with being past full. In the list of functions given for the twelve simples in Sefer Yetzirah (in jumbled order), the fire breath must claim ‘seeing’, for it is to the eye that both the dancer and fire itself (meaning light) appeal.
[edit] II La Papesse
II LaPapesse is E-eadhe, quivering aspen (white poplar), sensitive to the slightest breeze and showing the effect by a shimmering of its leaves, light on one side, dark on the other, as if living up to its number through a dichotomy of light versus darkness. What is so amazing about the image here is that in the canopy arrangement above the seated symbol for mother Church (or ‘Pope Joan’) is a scene to which she is oblivious but to which we, once we notice it, can never again be: a couple are about to mate, the erect, circumcised male organ reaching right across the seated lady’s breast-bone as what binds her cloak together in the front. The scene is, as it were, from another dimension, an impression only, yet once seen remains and will not go back into oblivion, though it can be ‘tuned out’ when concentrating on the seated figure. This figure with her otherworldly sexual overtones represent the eighth sign, that of circumcision (done on the eighth day of life), and is the letter heh added to Abram to make Abraham, symbolizing the Covenant. Being Greek epsilon, this is bardic E, vowel of autumn and the waning moon, and the eighth sign, scorpio or mid-autumn, is associated with one’s ‘secrets’, meaning one’s privates. It is the male organ in the male, the clitoris in the female—most sensitive or aspen-like organ in man—for the simple reason that what immediately follows straight down or physicality (libra) represents desire, or where one tries to take the physical present instant: the organ giving the most physical pleasure symbolizes desire with respect to the physical, the human’s primary concern. This sign begins the trek back up to the top of the round, just as the atom-type here, helium, gently lifts blimps, balloons, and male voices (to the register of the female) when inhaled. The image here clearly means self-restraint—the Covenant—its central image a cloistered female (the waning phase being for weaning females). Its number makes it the breath of the second element, air, its sign that to which a unit’s breath or ‘other’ points when its aries is in leo or manifested air (what approaches within earshot). Hence of the twelve functions given in Sefer Yetzirah it must claim ‘hearing’, which suggests she is reading her book aloud, perhaps to cover up the sounds of lovemaking produced by the phantom love scene to which she is ostensibly oblivious. A comb, Eleusinian symbol for the female organ (perhaps on the analogy of its straightening effect on hair), is heh’s shape in proto-Canaanite (we straightened it, turned it around, and sawed off its handle to make our E), which also portrays the characteristically perpendicular-to-the-trunk branches of aspen itself.
[edit] III L’Imperatrice
III L’Imperatrice is I-idho, yew, the tree and vowel of old age, old moon, winter, and good longbows. Here the shriveling old moon is still with us, as the central figure is female (still girl-weaning time), but it stands in perfect contrast to the freshness of inception of B-birch: these two, the first and last letters in ogham, retain their tree names as runes and stand for the pillars Jachin-Boaz. Hence it is fortunate the image here has something to point out the male character of Jachin or backbone, namely the shield-eagle whose tail feathers clearly appear to reach out beyond the shield and embrace her about the middle: this counterbalances the mother’s arm entering V LePape that turns ‘him’ into female Boaz, but since Boaz is the broken or incomplete pillar, she is NOT present on the card, whereas the shield-eagle IS. Numbered for the third element, I is water’s breath (breath or ‘other’ of a unit whose aries is in virgo, manifested water), which places it at sagittary, our late autumn, Kelts figuring winter began at Samhain or Hallowe’en, making sagittary’s month the first complete month of winter. As water’s breath, it must be the Sefer Yetzirah function ‘tasting’, and the card conveys the age-old image of woman’s being ruler in her own kitchen (being of the age before feminism), or ruler of a man’s heart ‘through his stomach’ (Napoleon said armies ‘crawl on their stomachs’), hence his (the eagle’s) embracing her about hers. The proto-Semitic zayin, shaped like the handle of a sword (its name conveying the meaning ‘to arm’), is even displayed right on her, in the form of her ‘halter’, in case we should miss it (since it is no-longer its old vowel self): one must arm (or steel) oneself against old age. Zayin’s equivalence to bardic I is confirmed by runic having both I and Ii (‘yew’ and ‘ice’), the former its horizontals-removed form of Greek zeta: it and zeta both convey the principle of the cold front—cold air moving in underneath warmer air—zeta therefore being the original (our Z). Its atom-type, lithium, is used to treat the depression such cold fronts instill, if the mood swing be inordinately acute: this must work on the basis of ‘shoring up one’s potassium (same valence) from underneath’ in some way, judging by its placement, as our diets tend towards potassium deficiency. This card therefore symbolizes ‘an even keel’.
[edit] XVIIII Le Soleil
XVIIII LeSoleil is Ii (Gr. ixias), the mistletoe or loranthus, the latter its eastern European equivalent, also rooted in trees, which in fact likes to live in oak while mistletoe usually has to be grafted thereon. Its rune is called ‘ice’ and depicts an icicle, which also hovers in the air so to speak. This is yod, which in square-Hebrew hovers above the line on which one writes: its being a mere ‘jot’ (iota) or spark is consistent with its being the last episode in the moon’s course, the dark o’ the moon or beginning of male-weaning time—hence the twin gods in their ‘diapers’. It stands at the last manifested station on the Egg—one’s potential spark of self-knowledge, but also the earth breath, or where a unit’s ‘other’ points when its ‘head’ is in libra, the manifested (weighed) earth. It is third-from-the-end, as I is third-from-the-beginning, and Sefer Yetzirah itself subsumes earth, the fourth element, into the third Sefirah, saying with regard to it (Gra version) “and He poured snow over them / and it became dust / as it is written / ‘For to snow He said, “Become earth”’ (Job, 37:6).” Of the functions given the simples in that tome, ‘smelling’ belongs to earth, and in the card we see two males stripped down competing in some game in sunny daylight with drops of sweat scattered in the air about them. It is interesting that the tifinag character probably corresponding hereto has as one common form a shape something like the golden sickle with which Pliny the Elder says druids harvested mistletoe, and proto-Canaanite yod can be taken for two arms holding a scythe (since yod’s sign cuts off or ends manifestation), though its primary meaning (consistent with ‘jot’) is two arms drawing a line in the dirt with a stick, possibly a Phoenician illustration of how druids taught letters (and then smudged them out with the foot) amongst their close collaborators, the Kelts. Mistletoe is Virgil’s Golden Bow, with which Aeneas gained entry to the underworld, and since it is the dark of the moon itself, it is the domain solely of the golden sun. The twins are of course all twin founder-gods and such, specifically Mr. Heroic and Mr. Satiric, at play together here in the instant before one must perforce take over from the other. They also most likely refer to the relation this card’s number bears to the sun, namely the well-known 19-year cycle of conjunction of solar and lunar periods. Finally, this completes the horizontal diameter of the Egg or cell, and just so, its atom-type, potassium, connects via this to the chlorine with which it forms its salt: through this, it marshals the fluids within cells, thus counterbalancing the pull of sodium, which marshals those outside the cell via extension of this horizontal out to the leo of the Cauldron. This dichotomy also expresses that of fresh water kept in vessels versus the salty oceans these sail in, and that of the potassium-rich decay in fresh-water ponds as opposed to the sodium-rich oceans into which fresh water ultimately flows.
[edit] THE GREAT NAME
If you place the Trumps of the twelve simples on their wheel in order (starting from aries, VIII-XX-0-XVII-IIII-XVIII-XXI-II-III-XVIIII-XIIII-XIII), you will note that every other one is a large red-and-blue figure, except that the one that should be on the bottom is displaced one to the right: this expresses the fundamental tension, for yod-heh-vav-heh takes yod, the inner extremity, and vav, the outer, and puts them together not with the sign halfway between, libra (straight down), but with the one just to its right. This is because it expresses the tension created by the breaking-off of the front column Boaz beneath the sternum: yod, vav, and heh are three of the four microcosmic signs (which astrology calls female) of the manifested half, the missing one being qof at virgo-the-womb, where the stop Q interrupts the vowels sequence to express the hollow that has replaced the front column there. Nature’s great goal is not equilibrium between matter and antimatter but between inner and outer horizon, and the Name invokes the power that places something at qof the womb to express the heh or desire of both parents: it invokes the divine creative power as it exists in man, where it has fallen from head to loins and become procreative in nature.
Yod and both hehs are to the right or male side of the center-post, vav to the left or female side, hence each suit has a king (yod), a queen (vav), a knight (first heh), and a knave (second heh). Current tradition making the hehs female merely shows a secondary division, wherein the male half, yod-heh, and the female half, vav-heh, each contain both, as follows: based on Hebrew numeration, the yod is the desire in the male that the hands of male and female be conjoined, making 10 digits, the first heh is the hand of the female given in matrimony to the male, 5 digits, the vav, traditionally associated with the 6 directions of space, is the space for the male in the female—the place where the two are conjoined, vav meaning ‘and’ in Hebrew—and the second heh is the hand of the male given in matrimony to the female, 5 digits. Current tradition would lead one to believe, then, that originally the hand each gives the other in marriage is female (passive) in relation to yod and vav, that therefore her hand given him receives the action of his desire that their hands be joined thus (yod), and his hand given her receives the action of the space within her for him—namely their conjoining, in the female—meaning that it will be he who supports and helps raise the little tyke their conjoining makes.
The letters are chosen, says Sefer Yetzirah, “according to the mystery of the three mothers,” which can only mean by their connexion to the Logos, as this was the great secret concerning the mothers. This and the Lurianic tradition linking the Name to the Tree of Sefirot make all things clear. The latter puts yod at 2 (extending down from 1), the first heh at 3, vav at 4 through 9, and the second heh at 10. Just so, Hebrew 2, 3, and 4 (beit-gimel-dalet) occupy the same signs on the Cauldron yod-heh-vav do on the Egg, which shows that yod evokes Light from the knower mem and heh the desire of the doer alef, and that these two act together on the intervening sign sagittary to create a thought. This thought, in the form of dalet, then becomes translated (by the unmanifested half of the round) over onto the nature side to perch on the outer horizon, to marshal nature to conform to the lines (of reasoning) in the thought: this is vav, the thinker shin (U of the Logos). Finally, the thought reaches fruition and exteriorizes as an act, object, or event in physical reality (the present), whereupon desire, heh, either rejects the result (and so must relive it over again later) or accepts it as just and learns from it. Now the preparation one undergoes through Torah to acceptance of one’s destiny as divinely ordained (i.e. fitting or just), not serendipitous, is what is being referred to, I think, in the Lurianic expression tikkun, ‘restoration’, in the context of which the above tradition takes shape.
Now the match of ‘fathers’ (letters used in the Name) with mothers conforms to Hermetic Kabbalah’s assignment of elements to the Name in the order fire-water-air-earth, this being the order in which the wheels are evoked by the Name—taking the second heh as reaction, in the present (the fourth wheel), to the exteriorization of the thought—based on correspondence of wheels to elements IN THEIR NATURAL ORDER, fire-air-water-earth, the middle two having gotten turned around in Hermetic Kabbalah from confusing the Name with the original generation of worlds. Yet in the doctrine of tikkun, the worlds are associated with the Name in their original order (which must have generated the error in Hermetic Kabbalah in the first place): this has to do specifically with one’s preparation, through Torah ostensibly, to accept one’s destiny as just (is this not what the prophets preached?), which involves understanding that the initial yod-heh come already conjoined (in the name Yah) to make a thought, a finitely-durated thing of the thinker’s wheel or world, and that while the thinker is managing the thought till its time-and-place of exteriorization, the doer itself must prepare—through 613 mitzvot (commandments) and the study of Torah—to accept it once it arrives.
The vav of the Name is in one sense the Light bound in the thought while it cycles through nature (under guidance of the thinker), in another sense the life entrusted to the mother for gestation. For the power of the Name is that of thoughts determining nature’s shape, while the method is procreation: it is the conjoining of these two that the Name ultimately represents. Male and female follow a recurring pattern: a little tiny sperm fecundating a great big ovum, a little tiny electron ‘fecundating’ a great big proton, a little tiny yod, 2, fecundating a great big vav, 4-5-6-7-8-9, and so on. Finally, to confirm that we have the letters in the Name assigned to the wheels and mothers correctly, note that it is the King of Batons in which the first pillar of the throne-back, Jachin, is established, this being on yod’s side, while it is the Queen of Swords in which the second pillar of the throne-back, Boaz, is established, this being on vav’s side. Indeed fire of fire, air of air, water of water, and earth of earth are all quite clearly distinguished for us, by the King of Batons and Queen of Swords, as just explained, by the Knight of Cups being the Grail Knight, and by the Knave of Coins being the final hero of the tikkun: for while some Light remains cycling about through nature (the coin on the ground), some Light he has retrieved from nature and returned for use in future thinking (the coin he holds), which it can be hoped will be that leading to self-knowledge rather than a further smokescreen of material desires.
One doctrine integral to tikkun is that of the ‘shattering of the vessels’, in which Sefirot 4-9 and to a lesser extent 10 are unable to hold a sudden influx of light and break in pieces. Tarot shows the actual manifestation of this doctrine in the greater reality, so to speak. For in the dividing-up of each Sefirah by the Pips of the suit Swords (in reaction to being grouped into dichotomous pairs by this being the second world or wheel), the Sefirot thus sliced in two form the matrix of the Trumps, wherein 1 is divided into first and first counting-from-the-end, 2 into second and second-to-last, and so on. The remarkable thing about this is that the first three, together with the pivot or fulcrum XI LaForce, form an intact pattern, while the remainder ‘break up’, the last three even showing signs of having become dislodged by one to make the final three pairs 8-13, 9-12, and 10-11, which are, respectively, the alder-and-ash whence male-and-female were crafted in Norse myth (according to Bulfinch’s Mythology), the hazel-and-oak twixt which Grimm said there is ‘enmity’, and the ivy-and-holly whose rivalry is sung of in the Yuletide carol ‘The Holly and the Ivy’. But the first three are impressive: I, XI, and XXI are all ‘one thing’, that is, in itself, in relation to one ten-fingered, and in relation to two ten-fingereds. II, XI, and XX are each numerical +2s, adding two to any digital sum (or counterpart thereof in Roman numerals). And III, XI, and XVIIII are each +1 in valence. Note that XI LaForce figures in all three alignments.
The fashioners of the runes knew of the three mothers and knew where the simples and doubles both were placed on the round. The first and fifth runes of each aat of eight mark the end-points of one of the three macrocosmic (‘male’) axes, in the order aries-libra (F-R), then gemini-sagittary (H-I), then leo-aquarius (T-L). Each aat has its mother, in the same order as their counterparts in the Logos: the first and third, A and M, are each halfway through their aats, while S, the thinker who must coordinate things out in nature—and which occupies the only macrocosmic sign of the three delineating the self, sagittary—is all the way at the end of its (middle) aat. Moreover—and this seals it, in terms of proving what they knew—the two mothers associated with ‘unfallen’ parts of the self have, in the midst of the space each ‘carves out’, a sequence in which the Hebrew number of each invokes the bardic number of the letter following. In M’s case, it is just the symmetrical pair B-E (middle two of first four of third aat), which trade numbers (2 hands of 5 fingers each). But in S’s case, it is the middle four runes of the entire elder futhark and makes the sequence Ii-G-I-P, Hebrew 10 to bardic 10, Hebrew 3 to bardic 3, and Hebrew 7 to bardic 7: these actually show, using desire’s acquisitive side (G as ‘harvest’), the mechanism for turning the wheel—the details of the crank in X LaRoue deFortune—and the right of G, Hebrew 3, to claim Saturn as its planet, since Ii and I are the roof and floor of lead’s column, which G controls (by the mechanism thus laid out). As for the planets evidently assigned the other six doubles, they are (most likely) B-Mars, P-Mercury, D-Jupiter, T-sol, K-luna, and R-Venus, though B and T might be reversed in bardic thinking and D and P are closely bound together by their trading of places.
