AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve known for some time that those who prefer classical decks like the Tarot de Marseille to the esoteric reveries of the post-Occult Revival don’t subscribe to the conflation of Hebrew letters and trump cards in general, and particularly not to the model proposed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Rather than rejecting the concept out-of-hand, here I’ve put together a “rectified” sequence that reinstates the prototype of the Continental masters.

Because the unnumbered Fool of traditional decks was not directly related to zero and didn’t appear at the head of the procession as assumed by MacGregor Mathers, earlier authorities attributed the letter Aleph to the Magician as the first trump, which bumped the rest of the correspondences one card down the line. As someone who was weaned on the Golden Dawn system and the concept of the “Fool’s Journey,” I’m a bit flummoxed by this since I spent over 50 years doing it “the other way.” But I think it’s worth contemplating even if the handling of the Fool does seem a bit arbitrary.

I’m currently reading Tarot of the Bohemians and find that Papus stayed with the arrangement established by his predecessors (in particular Eliphas Levi). He variously placed the Fool at the end of the series as the twenty-second trump or set it immediately prior to the World, in the latter case assigning it the letter Shin. So I took the time to lay out his attributions with my Fournier TdM deck; I triple-checked the accuracy of the Hebrew letters I used for this but they came from a TrueType font so there are no guarantees.

I also played around visually with some with the philosophical musings of Polish mathematician Jozef Maria Hoene-Wronski as briefly explained by Papus. I seem to recall that Sallie Nichols did something similar with the 7×3 array of trump cards in Tarot and the Archetypal Journey, but her foundation was Jungian; at any rate, her middle row involved something akin to “preservation” if I recall correctly.

The “galaxy” card representing “Infinite Equilibrium” is my own creation (think “terminal entropy,” which sounds like Wronski’s “neutrality” and the “absolute reality” it produces). I tacked it on because the metaphysical notion of “fixed stars” intrigues me as an astrologer; in a forthcoming essay I’ll be describing it as “the next logical step in the Fool’s Journey beyond the World, a kind of ‘jumping-off place’ into the realm of cosmic consciousness.” Woo-woo!

Just a brief word about the reprise of the Fool. The upper placement is intended to express the Qabalistic primum mobile, the generative principle whose “center is everywhere and circumference nowhere” according to Empedocles (and later Voltaire). The zero suggests the “Cosmic Egg” of the occultists, from which the “hatching” of the phenomenal Universe is imminent as symbolized by the Magician’s “lemniscate” hat.

The lower installment shows the arrival of the “Natural Fool” that results from Wronski’s “neutralization of creation and preservation,” liberated from the wheel of incarnation and poised to head off into the “Infinite Equilibrium.” The association with Shin embodies the “eternal flame” of his ongoing spiritual quest, and he will be “traveling light.” The question this raises is whether he has been in any way enlightened by his sojourn in material existence, or whether that is yet to come; that’s still a very small “bundle of experiences” he’s carrying.

I’m strongly reminded of this rather nihilistic quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing,
Nor Whence, like water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.