tim@cmu-cs-k.ARPA (Tim Maroney) (06/08/85)
New Age Digest #8 Moderator: Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K.ARPA (uucp: seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim) Tue Feb 12 23:57:22 EST 1985 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- This time: Relation of Arabic and Chinese Numerals Archetypal Stories and Tarot Electronic version of 777 ---------------------------------------- From: ihnp4!ihuxf!pjs1@seismo.ARPA (Peter Silverman) Date: Sat Feb 2 15:46:55 1985 Subject: Chinese and Western, numbers, puns, etc Ellen, in an excerpt from Barbara Walker's Tarot book, talked about the history of the word for Six. The arabic numbers and their relation to the chinese symbols is very interesting and is additional evidence for Ms. Walker's idea. The chinese ideogram arabic numeral comment (very rough approximation) - 1 90 deg. rotation - 2 two strokes drawn - quickly becomes arabic # - - 3 as for the #2 - |_|_| | (ancient form) 4 loss of one arm converts a hand to arab number ----- | ------ (very rough | | sorry) 5 loss of some strokes,makes ------ our number | --- 6 the chinese, a little / \ man (4 limbs, body, head) the arabic is a representation of a penis (another version is the astrological symbol for Mars.) That is both chinese and arab numbers are representing maleness. The remaining numerals are to difficult to represent on this terminal, however in each case there is a close conection between the chinese number and the indo-arabic. It would seem that the origin of our numerals comes from a common set of beliefs shared between China and the West. Another example of this the Japanese word KI (chinese CHI), meaning breath, energy, spirit. The ideogram is very roughly ^ ___ * \ \/ possibly a Rice grain fermenting in a closed container, and giving off gas, that is making Saki, or fermented spirits. Thus the pun between spirit, as breath, psychic energy and alcohol exists in Chinese (and thus Japanese) and Western languages. Once again I think indicating a shared tradition (in this case probably through the route from Taoist alchemy to Arab amd western alchemy). My inforation on the Chinese Ideograms is from the "Kanji ABC" (Andrew Dykstra, William Kaufman, inc.) Peter Silverman ihnp4!ihuxf!pjs1 AT&T Bell Labs at Indian Hill STRANGE BUT FALSE: Many occult systems use tables of correspondences such as those for the qualities of the four elements. Unfortunately many of these qualities are meaningless to the modern American. New tables must be made to accomodate people who work in windowless offices and may thus not even know what the season is. I have kindly provided the begining of such a table (discovered in a flash of deep insight while paying a toll on the Illinois State Toll Road) element | EARTH AIR FIRE WATER =========================================================================== snack food | DING DONGS GUM POPCORN FRITOS | tv network | ABC NBC CBS PBS | appliance | CAN OPENER BLENDER MICROWAVE CUISINART | fast food | chain | McD's WENDYS BURGER KING KFK =========================================================================== The occult possibilies are endless, however my trance mercifully ended when the toll gate beeped and the gate rose passing me through to the other side. ---------------------------------------- From: Tim Maroney (tim@cmu-cs-k, seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim) Date: Thu Feb 7 15:30:16 EST 1985 Subject: Archetypal Stories in Tarot Copyright 1985 by the author (New Age Digest distribution note: limited hardcopy reproduction and electronic redistribution permitted to members of the digest. If you have an electronic copy of this for personal use, you may always make a personal hardcopy for ease of reading.) The Tarot Trumps And Their Suits (A draft of the first chapter of the unfinished book Archetypal Stories in Tarot) by Tim Maroney The Tarot Trumps are twenty-two cards of peculiar design. Their origin is in a time when decks of unusual cards were common, and different card schemes proliferated. Of all the decks from that period, only decks including the Trumps are widely known or used today, with the exception of the modern deck of playing cards. Even that contains a form of the Trump called The Fool, and has descended from a larger deck including the twenty-two Trumps. The exact circumstances of the Trumps' creation are unknown. There is nothing secret or sinister about this; it would be equally difficult to decide on a definitive first edition of other decks that have survived in museums or private collections from five hundred years ago. This gap of knowledge, however, has provided fodder for many unverifiable speculations on the Trumps' origin and their meaning. The cards are of unknown and possibly unknowable origin, due to the great gulf of time. The evidence has been tapped already; no miraculous new discoveries are likely, considering the fragility of old cards. Various "first decks" have been proclaimed and disproven, and the Trumps are far more dissimilar than similar to older Eastern decks. The hypothesis of Kabalistic origin is supported by the coincidence of number between the Trumps and the Hebrew letters, but in fact no inspiring coincidence exists between the images of the Trumps and the primary images of the Hebrew Kabala. Another coincidence of number involves the Christian twenty-two chapter book of Revelation, but again there is no real reason to prefer this idea. The first Tarot deck was drawn by an unknown hand for an unknown purpose. To make a start at solving the mystery of the Trumps' origin, consider a principle known to students of psychology and literature. Some symbols and stories tend to recur in different forms in tale after tale, whether the tales are scriptures, sagas, dreams, novels, or other forms of expression. For example, the symbols appearing in some modern novels can be traced to ancestors in prehistoric forms of ritual and drama. Human consciousness seems to prefer some forms of expression over others, in a way largely independent of culture. These preferred forms are often referred to in psychology and criticism as "archetypes". For instance, the idea of "mother" is obviously archetypal. The wrathful and stern father, the elusive trickster, the salvation of the Waste Land, the young man or god who dies and is then reborn: all these recur in some aspect in many legends. One reason for the Trumps' staying power may be a process of unconscious symbolic selection. A large number of different decks were produced, involving various kinds of orderings; the Tarot deck was one of these. Many decks inspired at least one variant edition, and some decks inspired artists to reproduce them more often. The preferred decks' inspirational force may have been due to their instrinsic power to evoke archetypes. The first artist may have been an unknown dotard, and bereft of all spiritual value, but the deck itself includes symbols appropriate to archetypal stories, and so has lasted to the present. This essay shows one way the Tarot Trumps can be correlated with three particular archetypal stories. These stories are of birth, of salavation, and of death and rebirth. The Trumps are divided into three suits, each suit corresponding to one of these archetypal stories. The suits have a common structure. Graphic illustrations of the Trump suits are useful; here is an illustration of their abstract nature. Force ========================================== Initiate Initiator Initiatrix ========================================================== Event One Event Two Event Three Event Four There are three different realizations of this abstract diagram. In each, one Trump plays each of the eight roles in the abstract diagram. There are three Trumps which represent the Force of an archetypal story: the Sun for birth, the World for salvation, and the Moon for death and rebirth. There are three Initiators: the Mage, the King, and the Priest; and three Initiatrixes, Strength, the Queen, and the Priestess; but only one Initiate, the Fool, for all three stories. There are three stories, each with four successive events, featuring the interplay of the Fool, the Initiator, and the Initiatrix. The first story is of birth. A man and a woman become lovers. They sexually consummate their love. The woman and the child undergo the pangs of birth. The child emerges into the world. The second story is of salvation. The King has become impotent, incapable of satisfying his Queen. The land has thus become desolate, arid waste. The King must be slain by one more virile. The young hero takes the slain King's throne by right of assassination. The new King takes his bride, the Queen. Mystically, the Waters are freed upon the land. The third story is of death and rebirth. The hero is unjustly convicted of some crime. He is executed by some means appropriate to the story's culture. A wandering hermit or doctor, an incomprehensible but immensely wise figure, comes upon the scene. The hero is returned to new and brilliant life. These three stories can be laid out in the "Event" positions of the abstract diagram above. Here, then, is the complete relation of Tarot cards to the stories, in diagrammatic form. (There is no real standard for Tarot card names. The oldest decks have neither name nor number. Still, we have to call them something to talk about them, and the names given are convenient and recognizable.) Birth (Spread One) ------------------ Sun === Fool Mage Strength ======================================== Lovers Temperance Tower Chariot ======================================================== Salvation (Spread Two) ---------------------- World ===== Fool King Queen ===================== Death Wheel Devil Star ============================ Death and Rebirth (Spread Three) -------------------------------- Moon ==== Fool Priest Priestess ========================================= Justice Hanged Man Hermit Judgment ======================================================== There is informal consensus on the meanings of the cards, although each commentator and artist differs from consensus on various points. The above division of the Trumps into three spreads is consistent with most of the consensus on the meanings of the cards. The intent is to show subtle structure in the Tarot deck and its usual interpretations, not to replace them. Clearly there is no single deck called "the Tarot deck" which will guide our thinking, nor any single book which is the definitive system of interpretation. However, consensus on many points is common even with unusual and surrealistic modern decks, such as the Book of Thoth and the Secret Dakini Oracle Deck. This is not to say there are not significant divergences and incompatibilities as well, but agreements and correspondences will be the main interest. Only the twenty-two Trumps will be considered at all. In fact, most Tarot decks contain fifty-six other cards. These are divided into four suits, usually Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins, with Pentagrams as a common modern affectation for the latter. There are four Court Cards in each suit, usually King, Queen, Knight, and Page, sometimes with a female figure for the latter instead. The four elements, the numbers from one to ten, the astrological decanates, the YHVH formula, the relation of this deck to the modern deck of playing cards, and other issues relating to the small cards are not considered herein. This book has three main sections, each devoted to one of the archetypal stories. Each section begins with a discussion of the archetypal story, from a literary, psychological, and eclectically religious perspective. Then each Trump that is correlated to the story will be discussed in turn. For each Trump an abstracted version will be found from various cards and texts. The meaning of that version will then be shown to be similar to the meaning of the corresponding event or figure in the section's archetypal story. Finally, suggestions for a new version of the Trump may appear. New versions will be introduced as more direct symbols of the archetypal meanings. They will incorporate to the greatest extent possible the traditional main emblems found on the Trump's cards, to preserve continuity with the Tarot as it has existed and still exists. ----------------------------------------------- Date: Mon Feb 11 16:43:14 EST 1985 From: Tim Maroney (you ought to know the address by now) Subject: Electronic version of 777 As Peter mentioned in his humorous signoff above, one of the usual things in occultism is tables of correspondences between various things. Probably the most ambitious and wide-ranging was Crowley's 777, which attempts to incorporate major symbols from a large number of different religions and mythologies into a single table with thirty-five lines. This includes Hebrew god-names, gods of the Greeks, Romans, Hindus, Nordics, and Christians, the elements, the magical weapons, geometric figures, astrological signs, planets, colors, smells, animals, plants, colors, senses, tarot cards, the I Ching, the Taoist system, etc. Crowley claimed that memorizing some twenty or so major columns of 777 was a worthwhile mystical practice in its own right, providing an increase in order among one's perceptions. Since ritual is essentially symbolic, it is also useful to lay out one's rituals guided by the appropriate columns of 777. However, the tables can be a pain. It would be nice to have a tool that laid out various columns in whatever arrangement is desired, acted as a simple trainer by omitting entries and asking the user to fill them in, and allowed the user to easily modify the existing tables and add new tables for his or her own use. Spurred by this thought or some less coherent variant of it, I attacked my diskettes using the most horrible weapon I could imagine, the Small-C compiler. Several days of bloody battle later, I had part of my prize, at least. The program does not incorporate an editor for tables (you have to use a separate text editor), and it does not have a training mode. I hope to add these later. It has two different displays, an overview of the tables' titles and a window onto a variable number of columns. On an 80-column screen, about six tables can be simultaneously displayed, and many others can be held in memory ot be displayed on request. The user interface is via UCSD-Pascal-style menus. What major features ought such a program to have? Clearly, it ought to have pictures, one respect in which my version fails, but they can be done without (until I write a Macintosh version, that is...) Without pictures, the inclusion of Arabic, Hebrew, etc., columns is impossible. Oh, and if anyone wants a copy of the current version, I can mail you one or let you FTP it if you're on ARPA. The code should work with any C compiler, but I have not made operating system modifications. (It is currently a CP/M program). Non-portable code for screen control and such is separately marked and clearly defined. -=- Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University Computation Center ARPA: Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K uucp: seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim CompuServe: 74176,1360 audio: shout "Hey, Tim!" ------------------------ End of New Age Digest #8 ------------------------ -=- Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University, Networking ARPA: Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K uucp: seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim CompuServe: 74176,1360 audio: shout "Hey, Tim!"