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The Book
of
Thoth
A Short Essay on the Tarot
of the Egyptians
Being
The Equinox Volume III No. V
by
Part One
The Theory of the Tarot
II
The Tarot and the Holy Qabalah
The Next issue
is the Holy Qabalah. This is a very simple subject, and presents no
difficulties to the ordinary intelligent mind. There are ten numbers
in the decimal system; and there is a genuine reason why there should be
ten numbers, and only ten, in a numerical system which is not merely
mathematical, but philosophical. It is necessary, at this point, to
introduce the "Naples Arrangement". But first of all, one
must understand the pictorial representation of the Universe given by the
Holy Qabalah. (See diagram.)
This picture represents the Tree of Life, which
is a map of the Universe. One must begin, as a mathematician would,
with the idea of Zero, Absolute Zero, which turns out on examination to
mean any quantity that one may choose, but not, as the layman may at first
suppose, Nothing, in the "absence-of-anything" vulgar sense of
the word. (See "Berashith", Paris,
1902).
"The Naples Arrangement"
The Qabalists expanded this idea of Nothing, and got a second kind of
Nothing which they called "Ain Soph"--"Without Limit".
(This idea seems not unlike that of Space.) They then decided that
in order to interpret this mere absence of any means of definition, it was
necessary to postulate the Ain Soph Aur--"Limitless Light".
By this they seem to have meant very much what the late Victorian men of
science meant, or thought that they meant, by the Luminiferous Ether.
(The Space-Time Continuum?)
All this is evidently without form and void;
these are abstract conditions, not positive ideas. The next step
must be the idea of Position. One must formulate this thesis:
If there is anything except Nothing, it must exist within this Boundless
Light; within this Space; within this inconceivable Nothingness, which
cannot exist as Nothingness, but has to be conceived of as a Nothingness
composed of the annihilation of two imaginary opposites. Thus
appears The Point, which has "neither parts nor magnitude, but
only position".
But position does not mean anything at all unless
there is something else, some other position with which it can be
compared. One has to describe it. The only way to do this is
to have another Point, and that means that one must invent the number Two,
making possible The Line.
But this Line does not really mean very much,
because there is yet no measure of length. The limit of knowledge at
this stage is that there are two things, in order to be able to talk about
them at all. But one cannot say that they are near each other, or
that they are far apart; one can only say that they are distant. In
order to discriminate between them at all, there must be a third thing.
We must have another point. One must invent The Surface; one
must invent The Triangle. In doing this, incidentally,
appears the whole of Plane Geometry. One can now say, "A is
nearer to B than A is to C".
But, so far, there is no substance in any
of these ideas. In fact there are no ideas at all, except the idea
of Distance and perhaps the idea of Between-ness, and of Angular
Measurement; so that Plane Geometry, which now exists in theory, is after
all completely inchoate and incoherent. There has been no approach
at all to the conception of a really existing thing. No more has
been done than to make definitions, all in a purely ideal and imaginary
world.
Now then comes The Abyss. One cannot
go any further into the ideal. The next step must be the Actual--at
least, an approach to the Actual. There are three points, but there
is no idea of where any one of them is. A fourth point is essential,
and this formulates the idea of matter.
The Point, the Line, the Plane. The fourth
point, unless it should happen to lie in the plane, gives The Solid.
If one wants to know the position of any point, one must define it by the
use of three co-ordinate axes. It is so many feet from the North
wall, and so many feet from the East wall, and so many feet from the
floor.
Thus there has been developed from Nothingness a
Something which can be said to exist. One has arrived at the idea of
Matter. But this existence is exceedingly tenuous, for the
only property of any given point is its position in relation to certain
other points; no change is possible; nothing can happen. One is
therefore compelled, in the analysis of known Reality, to postulate a
fifth positive idea, which is that of Motion.
This implies the idea of Time, for only
through Motion, and in Time, can any event happen. Without this
change and sequence, nothing can be the object of sense. (It is to
be noticed that this No. 5 is the number of the letter Hé in the Hebrew
alphabet. It is the womb in which the Great Father, who is
represented by the letter Yod, which is pictorially the representation of
an ultimate Point, moves and begets active existence.)
There is now possible a concrete idea of the
Point; and, at last, it is a point which can be self-conscious, because it
can have a Past, Present and Future. It is able to define itself in
terms of the previous ideas. Here is the number Six, the centre of
the system: self-conscious, capable of experience.
At this stage it is convenient to turn away for a
moment from the strictly Qabalistic symbolism. The doctrine of the
next three numbers (to some minds at least) is not very clearly expressed.
One must look to the Vedanta system for a more lucid interpretation of the
numbers 7, 8 and 9, although they correspond very closely with the
Qabalistic ideas. In the Hindu analysis of existence the Rishis
(Sages) postulate three qualities: Sat, the Essence of Being itself;
Chit, Thought, or Intellection; and Ananda (usually translated Bliss), the
pleasure experienced by Being in the course of events. This ecstasy
is evidently the exciting cause of the mobility of pure existence.
It explains the assumption of imperfection on the part of Perfection.
The Absolute would be Nothing, would remain in the condition of
Nothingness; therefore, in order to be conscious of its possibilities and
to enjoy them, it must explore these possibilities. One may here
insert a parallel statement of this doctrine from the document called The
Book of the Great Auk to enable the student to consider the position
from the standpoint of two different minds.
"All elements must at one time have been
separate.--That would be the case with great heat.--Now, when the atoms
get to the Sun, we get that immense, extreme heat, and all the elements
are themselves again. Imagine that each atom of each element
possesses the memory of all his adventures in combination. By the
way, that atom, fortified with memory, would not be the same atom; yet it
is, because it has gained nothing from anywhere except this memory.
Therefore, by the lapse of time and by virtue of memory, a thing could
become something more than itself; thus, a real development is possible.
One can then see a reason for any element deciding to go through this
series of incarnations, because so, and only so, can he go; and he suffers
the lapse of memory which he has during these incarnations, because he
knows he will come through unchanged.
"Therefore you can have an infinite number
of gods, individual and equal though diverse, each one supreme and utterly
indestructible. This is also the only explanation of how a Being
could create a world in which War, Evil, etc., exist. Evil is only
an appearance, because (like "Good") it cannot affect the
substance itself, but only multiply its combinations. This is
something the same as Mystic Monotheism; but the objection to that theory
is that God has to create things which are all parts of Himself, so that
their interplay is false. If we presuppose many elements, their
interplay is natural."
These ideas of Being, Thought and Bliss
constitute the minimum possible qualities which a Point must possess if it
is to have a real sensible experience of itself. These correspond to
the numbers 9, 8 and 7. The first idea of reality, as known by the
mind, is therefore to conceive of the Point as built up of these previous
nine successive developments from Zero. Here then at last is the
number Ten.
In other words, to describe Reality in the form
of Knowledge, one must postulate these ten successive ideas. In the Qabalah, they are called "Sephiroth", which means
"Numbers". As will be seen later, each number has a
significance of its own; each corresponds with all phenomena in such a way
that their arrangement in the Tree of Life, as shown in the diagrams (pp.
266, 268, 270)
[to be scanned], is a map of the Universe. These ten numbers are
represented in the Tarot by the forty small cards.