10. The Kabalahd

5 GEBURAH. The four Fives. Four times four sins avenged His justice sum. 6 TIPHERETH. The four Sixes. Four rays unclouded make His beauty known. 7 NETSAH. The four Sevens. Four times His conquest shall in song be shown. 8 HOD. The four Eights. Four times He triumphs on the timeless plane. 9 JESOD. The four Nines. Foundations four His great white throne maintain. 10 MALKUTH. The four Tens. One fourfold kingdom owns His endless sway, As from His crown there streams a fourfold ray. By this simple arrangement the kabalistic meaning of each card is exhibited. For example, the five of Clubs signifies rigorously GEBURAH of JOD, that is, the justice of the Creator or the wrath of man; the seven of Cups signifies the victory of mercy or the triumph of woman; the eight of Swords signifies conflict or eternal equilibrium; and so of the others. We can thus understand how the ancient pontiffs proceeded to make the oracle speak. The chance dealing of the laminae produced invariably a fresh kabalistic meaning, exactly true in its combinations, which alone were fortuitous; and, seeing that the faith of the ancients attributed nothing to chance, they read the answers of Providence in the oracles of the Tarot, which were called THERAPH or THERAPHiM by the Hebrews, as the erudite Kaba-list Gaffarel, one of the magicians employed by Cardinal Richelieu, was the first to perceive. As to the Court-cards, a final couplet will suffice to explain them: KING, QUEEN, KNIGHT, ESQUIRE. The married pair, the youth, the child, the race; Thy path by these to Unity retrace. At the end of the “Ritual” we shall provide further details, together with full documents, concerning the marvellous Book of the Tarot, of all books the most primitive, the key of prophecies and dogmas, in a word, the inspiration of inspired works, a fact which has remained unperceived, not only by the science of Court de Gebelin but by the extraordinary intuitions of Etteilla or Alliette. The ten SEPHIROTH and the twenty-two Tarots form what the Kabalists term the thirty-two paths of absolute science. With regard to particular sciences, they distinguish them into fifty chapters, which they call the fifty gates: among Orientals the word gate signifies government or authority. The rabbins also divided the Kabalah into BERESHITH, or universal Genesis, and MERCAVAH, or the Chariot of Ezekiel; then by means of a dual interpretation of the kabalistic alphabets, they formed two sciences, called GEMATRIA and TEMURAH, and so composed the Notary Art, which is fundamentally the complete science of the Tarot signs and their complex and varied application to the divination of all secrets, whether of philosophy, Nature or the future itself. We shall recur to this work in the twentieth chapter of our “Ritual”.