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Okay so I promised to talk about the minor arcana, the 56 tarot cards that resemble a regular deck of playing cards with an additional court card. But before we can do this we need to back up and talk about the Qabalah, which influenced The Golden Dawn and Crowley heavily. Notes here that I am not Jewish, and I'm talking here about the hermetic Qabalah, which draws on the Jewish Kabbalah but also looks to Roman and Egyptian mythology, Christianity, and other sources, and is by no means a "pure" Kabbalah but of course owes a great deal to it.
So, let's start by talking about the tetragrammaton, the sacred Jewish name for god, written as YHVH (יהוה) and pronounced, well, no one is exactly sure because biblical Hebrew doesn't have written vowels, and meditating on the possible pronunciations of the name of God is something that practitioners of Judaism hold sacred, but it's usually transcribed as Jehovah or Yaweh. Now, you will note that there are four letters in the tetragrammaton, and the number four is really important in Qabalistic thought. There are four worlds (planes of existence) and four parts of the soul in Qabalistic belief, and this corresponds to the four elements and, you guessed it--the four suits of the minor arcana and the four court cards.
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So, let's start by talking about the tetragrammaton, the sacred Jewish name for god, written as YHVH (יהוה) and pronounced, well, no one is exactly sure because biblical Hebrew doesn't have written vowels, and meditating on the possible pronunciations of the name of God is something that practitioners of Judaism hold sacred, but it's usually transcribed as Jehovah or Yaweh. Now, you will note that there are four letters in the tetragrammaton, and the number four is really important in Qabalistic thought. There are four worlds (planes of existence) and four parts of the soul in Qabalistic belief, and this corresponds to the four elements and, you guessed it--the four suits of the minor arcana and the four court cards.
( Read More )
