Path: typhoon.sonic.net!not-for-mail Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.divination,alt.tarot Subject: Re: Elegance, Tarot and Qabalah (was Qabalah and Tarot History ...) References: <3c22ec01.55957681@trialnews.peoplepc.com> <3c25caa4.8701904@news> <3c24307b.48130592@trialnews.peoplepc.com> From: nagasiva Reply-To: nagasiva@yronwode.com User-Agent: nn/6.6.0 Lines: 53 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 07:58:11 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.201.242.18 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sonic.net X-Trace: typhoon.sonic.net 1011686291 208.201.242.18 (Mon, 21 Jan 2002 23:58:11 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 23:58:11 PST Xref: typhoon.sonic.net alt.magick.tyagi:30896 alt.magick:284451 alt.divination:18395 alt.tarot:96772 50020121 VI! om glass@panix.com (Robert Scott Martin): >Glad you're back. muchas gracias. good to see you posting again too. nagasiva : >> whether or not someone has >> a problem with the assignment says nothing about its elegance, and the >> combination of Beth with 1 is an obviously inelegant pairing. > Symbolic systems are rarely congruent, which means that attempts to map > one onto another will rarely meet with perfect success (or "elegance") -- > something always changes in the act of translation. no excuse for inelegance, however. just because there may be few combinatory elegances, if one accepts elegance as a mark in FAVOUR of any particular pairing, then there is no reason to ignore it. pretending it doesn't exist is worse than ignoring it, though. it is more rational to acknowledge and prioritize it lower in one's schema than other factors. > This should not be news to anyone. Even Crowley in 777 (an enormously > hegemonic and occasionally slipshod book of maps) bends over backward to > warn readers that Mars and Chesed may both "translate" to the element of > water, but Mars does not correspond to Chesed, and behaving as though it > did leads inevitably to trivial paradoxes like 1=2. indeed. thus inevitably the most inclusive system will have to have some kind of factor-base like 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 7 * 9 * 11 * 13 = 1081080. what a number! the combinations like trigrams (e.g. I Ching, 8, unless you'd prefer hexagrams) and decagraphs (e.g. Sefirotic Tree, unless you choose 32 with paths or an 11th sphere for a dodecagraph) is bound to incorporate theoretical stratifiers like for the first 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 while the other may settle into (1+)2+8 or 32, even 2*32. the first (1/Tao; 2+3/Yin/Yang; 4->11/8 trigrams) was Crowley's method in "Book of Thoth" and I thought it was quite elegant, conforming to a degree with my deeper and deeper investigation into the nature of both spheres and trigrams ("The Chinese Cosmos", p. 270, Weiser, 1981 and note his use of the trigram for HEAVEN for Da'ath, FIRE for Tiphareth, WATER for YESOD, and EARTH for Malkuth, along the Middle Pillar). blessed beast nagasiva ======== cat says hi while working on her herb magic book from her aged tower of antiques and mary engelbreit