What is the true attribution and order of the 22 Major Arcana? The answer depends to a great extent on which Tarot deck you use, or which Secret Society you subscribe to. Or you can go by the flavours generated by the Adepts representing the schisms in those Secret Societies. For example, the common origin of Aleister Crowley, A.E. Waite and Paul Foster Case is found in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Today there is a Tarot for every conceivable religion, dogma, gender bias, way of life, magical or spiritual system… the list goes on and on.

The picture is so confusing that many Tarot readers simply focus on the divinatory meanings. I don’t blame them.

Transposing the Attributions

The true attribution of the Major Arcana, if they exist, are clearly not to be found in the psychobabble of the variegated Tarot. Even tweaking the fundamentals is not to be trusted. The transposition of Strength and Justice used in The Book of Thoth and the Rider-Waite deck is a good example. We just have to assume that the relevant Secret Society knew what it was doing and why. Even the most erudite Tarot Expert has doubts – look at the fudges in the Book of Thoth, where Crowley never quite convinces the reader of his transposition of The Emperor with The Star card. In fact, most of these tweaks serve the purposes of the Magical Order and its use of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in its initiatory system.

What then is the true attribution of the Major Arcana? Clearly it is not the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which was only figured out in the 17th century – it is a convenient construct. We have to go further back in time. The number of Trumps clearly correspond to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet – 22 is the only constant we have. Since there is very little historical agreement on the depiction of each Trump, we will for the moment discard that too.

The Sepher Yetsirah

The attribution of the 22 Major Arcana are derived from the attribution of the letters of the 22 Hebrew alphabet. The order of the 22 Hebrew letters has not deviated for millennia. It is no secret that the attributions of the Hebrew letters are found in the Sepher Yetsirah, a 12th century document written in Spain. These attributions are primarily astrological – 7 planets, 12 signs of the Zodiac, and 3 for the elements. What determines whether a letter is attributed to a planet, Zodiac sign or element is to do with the way the letter is pronounced, which need not concern us here.

There are many versions of the Sepher Yetsirah, and what is remarkable is that while the attributions and order of the three elements and signs of the zodiac remain consistent, nobody can agree on the planetary attributions of the remaining seven letters. The Tarot inherited this mess; as it stands the planetary attributions of the Major Arcana are entirely arbitrary, unless one of course follows the “logic” of the paths on the post-dated Kabbalistic Tree of Life. It then becomes curious that Tarot experts such as McGregor Mathers and Crowley felt the need to transpose the unchanging order of the Zodiac signs/Trumps while ignoring the arbitrary planetary Arcana.

The Planetary order as key to the attributions

We have to ask the question. Is there such an order to the seven planets? There is, but unfortunately it is not well-known in the scientific modern age. The problem is that the planetary order is terrestrially based. We of course know that the planets revolves around the Sun. The Chaldean Order of the planets is Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon, and it is based upon the relative speeds of the planets as seen from Earth, starting with the slowest, Saturn and culminating in the fastest – the Moon. The Chaldean Order is so ubiquitous in medieval astrological and magical texts that the authors did not need to refer to it, any more than modern astrologers have to specify that Taurus follows Aries.

Restoring the Chaldean Order to the Hebrew alphabet creates massive problems for Secret Societies for it entirely screws up the order of the Paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life (as if it wasn’t arbitrary in the first place!). Why is that such a problem? The business model of Secret Societies depends on the initiation system of fees for candidates which works its way up through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. There is more chance of Turkeys voting for Christmas. The Chaldean Order already appears in the Sephiroth on the Tree of Life, starting at Binah for Mars and culminating in the Moon at Yesod. The problem is that the order is backwards!

In the next post we will examine what the Major Arcana will look like when the planetary order is restored.