Newsgroups: alt.tarot,alt.magick
Path: shell.portal.com!svc.portal.com!sdd.hp.com!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!key
From: key@netcom.com (peter li'ir key)
Subject: iching and tarot 1
Message-ID: <keyDpHG1A.I36@netcom.com>
Organization: springhaven
Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 08:10:22 GMT
Lines: 131
Sender: key@netcom13.netcom.com
Xref: shell.portal.com alt.tarot:5961 alt.magick:71207

note:  i did not wish to make this a treatise on the i-ching so
       many of you may find my criticisms lacking in detail.
       my apologies, but the i ching and chinese mysticism/cosmology
       are such convoluted works, that i could not cover them
       in enough detail to give a complete context within the scope
       of this post.  i hope though that i have given enough
       detail to give a glipse into the technical issues i am
       talking about.

kwitt wrote:
>[crowley] has associated all of the court cards with the I-Ching.  
>I do not believe that his associations are accurate.  

i don't think there is only one way to associate the i-ching
to tarot.  some of them are less useful than others perhaps.
	
>I understand the logic behind those associations but I do not believe that
>he understood the cyclical nature of the court cards in that each is
>representative of either an involutionary or evolutionary impulse.  

i also think that there isn't only one way to look at tarot.
though i know there are those who seem to think that way.

>It also appears as if he had not distinquished between the trigrams of
>interior and exterior change.  

i think kwitt's idea here is refreshing and novel!
unfortunately i don't think kwitt understands the trigram as
well as kwitt could.

>Aliester Crowley did not choose to share his logic
>for his I-Ching associations but an analysis of them indicates that his
>choice was  based on nothing more than the simplistic identification of
>wands and knights with thunder, cups and queens with lake, princes and
>swords with wind, and princesses and disks with mountain.

simplistic, but not necessarily wrong.

>He was unable

or he simply choose not

>to distinquish appropriately which trigram of the hexagrams should be on
>top and which should be on the bottom and between which trigram was an
>attribute and which was an archetype.  Taking note of the significance of
>the above mentioned factors, the associations would be thus:

i still think kwitt failed to apprehend the nature the trigrams
completely.

kwitt assigns:
>Trigram archetypes are: 
>earth (earth) 
>heaven (air) 
>fire (fire) 
>water (water)

here i think western earth (w-earth) to i ching earth (i-earth)
works, but the other's have a bit of a problem.

i-heaven doesn't map well to w-air, if anything i would map
it to w-fire.  it looks like kwitt assigns w-air to i-heaven
'cuz i-heaven seems air like to him, but in chinese culture
heaven and the sky are not associated with the element of air,
but are a fundamental building block/element of the cosmos in
and of themselves.  also w-air and chinese air (chi) don't map 
well together either, but that gets really convoluted, and
has been covered before.  
traditional attributes of i-heaven are:
 heaven, sky, creative power, firmness.
 assoiated to chinese element of metal.
 power, wisdom, high status, wealth,
 courage, leadership, contentment.
compare these to the usual attributes of w-air (which i am
not listing).

w-fire to i-fire has problems in that chinese/i ching attributes
are more like the attributes of w-air.  again, kwitt appears to 
assign w-fire to i-fire because on the surface (fire is fire)
they are the same, but symbolically the are different.
i-fire attributes:
  fire, sun, brilliance, clinging
  chinese element of fire
  intelligence, clarity, sound judgment, intuition, correspondence

and so with i-water:
  water,rain, danger, abysmal
  chinese element of water
  difficulties, peril, hardship, crimes, cunning, wories, confined
  activity

kwitt assigns:
>Trigram attributes are:    
>mountain (earth) 
>wind (air) 
>thunder (fire) 
>lake or marsh (water)

here i think kwitt is a great deal more successful.

***

i think kwitt's mappings are delightful, but have the problem in that
they only cover 16 of the 64 hexagrams, and that the hexagrams kwitt
uses are not always going to work well with the courtcard that map out.
i think the same about crowley's mapping.

kwitt does manage to balance greater yin, lesser yin, greater yang,
and lesser yang.  and the yin and yang within these.

and i am curious if kwitt considered the possiblities of assigning the
rest of cards.  what affects might moving lines have.  

also i think there are three other mappings kwitt should consider:
archetype to archetype, attribute to archetype, and attribute to 
attribute.

>Note that in my associations there is one archetypal and one attributional
>element in each hexagram.  Also, the archetypal element is on top of the
>hexagrams for wands and disks and they are on the bottom on the hexagrams
>for the cups and swords.  This is because the wands and disks are
>representative of the forces of evolution (wands being the active  aspect 
>and disks being the passive aspect) and the cups and swords are
>representative of the forces of involution (swords being the active aspect
>and cups being the passive aspect).                   

what is involution?


peter li'ir key
key@netcom.com