Path: shell.portal.com!svc.portal.com!opentext.com!ia.mks.com!zephyr!info.ucla.edu!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!realtime.net!usenet From: Jess Karlin Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick,alt.tarot,alt.divination,talk.religion.newage Subject: Re: Kabbalah: a third system of interpreting the SY on the paths? Date: Sat, 02 Mar 1996 08:54:33 +0000 Organization: Real/Time Communications Internet customer posting Lines: 49 Message-ID: <31380CC9.766B@bga.com> References: <4h4udf$dr2@jobe.shell.portal.com> <4h6i1p$r0r@firebrick.mindspring.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: jake-4i.aip.realtime.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-RTcode: d3d24a463178a4a6ee38611c X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (Macintosh; I; 68K) Xref: shell.portal.com alt.magick.tyagi:6996 alt.magick:68455 alt.tarot:5302 alt.divination:6991 talk.religion.newage:48906 (Gentle) wrote: > This relates to some reasearch I did a couple of years ago, wondering > what a Tarot deck might look like using the Gra's correspondances for > the SY, rather than the mangled translation-of-a-translation used by > the GD. There are several versions of SY and many interpretations of what they mean. The traditions surrounding the different symbolic trees of creation are not all attached to the various texts of SY---example, the complex tree system created by Raymon Lull. Nor is kabbala a strictly Judaic composition. It is an aggregate, just like tarot (and is, like tarot, initially a product of late medieval/renaissance metaphorical 'tempering'). It is one thing to say you disagree with traditional tarot attributions, favoring one view over another, and quite another to suggest you understand the way in which its traditional construction DOES WORK in the way it is established. The motivation for changing correspondences often originates in an inability to grasp the ways in which the traditional correspondences properly function. The surprising thing is not that most of the Golden Dawn kabbalistic attributions are problematic (which would certainly motivate one to either try to find the 'true' attributions or to abandon kabbala completely as a metaphorical measure), but rather that so many of them DO make a great deal of sense. > The results were interresting from a Kabbalistic standpoint, > but seemed too divorced from the Tarot. Why would that surprise you? The form you were using was not MORE 'correct', just different. A pear tree looks like an apple tree, somewhat, but they are not the same tree. > I wound up concluding that > what is most important about the cards is not their (late) Kabbalistic > attributions, but their intuitive pictoral meanings. That's a hasty conclusion, especially for someone 'dealing' with the modern tarot based on Golden Dawn symbolism. Clearly, the intentional exclusion of kabbalistic considerations for those cards, regardless of what one may think about the accuracy of those correspondances, is simply an excuse and an invitation to misinterpret their symbolism. And what does "intuitive pictoral meanings" even mean? (jk)