“Three Fathers and their generations, Seven conquerors and their armies, and Twelve boundaries of the Universe.
See now, of these words, the faithful witnesses are the Universe, the Year and the Man.”
-Sepher Yetzirah
In the first Kabbalistic book of creation, the Sepher Yetzirah, the Hebrew letters are broken down into three categories: the three mothers (a.k.a. fathers), the seven doubles, and the twelve simple letters. The twelve simple letters are associated with the zodiac, the seven double letters are associated with the sun, the moon and the five visible planets, and the three mother letters are associated with Fire, Air and Water. The three mother letters also have a double nature since they are also referred to as three fathers depending on the context in which they’re being used. The Hebrew letters do have numeric associations, however in the Sepher Yetzirah the numbers are clearly considered separately and before the twenty-two letters, which is why there are the so-called thirty-two paths of wisdom in the Tree of Life and not just twenty-two.
The Tree of Life in the image above on the right side has a path arrangement that is based on a combination of all the path numbers 0-21, where if the number was 12 or 21 then the 1 would go to one end of the path and the 2 to the other end; then the path numbers that connect to the sphere are combined with the number of the sphere itself and the sum total is then reduced down to its’ single ideal number. The arrangement above is one where all the combined path/sephirah numbers could be reduced down to the ideal number six.
The Tree of Life on the above left side has a path arrangement that is based on a geometric configuration of the astrological attributes, which can also be seen in the Cube of Space page of this site. Both of these configurations reveal different possible manifestations of the paths with these particular spherical, numerical, and planetary associations.
In both these examples the paths are not just based a subjective or arbitrary arrangement but on either a numerical or a geometrical based consideration. The Tarot attributes first needed to be reevaluated to see how they could correspond with our modern understanding of the planets. Much to my surprise they could represent the nature of the planets and the zodiac even better than others had done before if their attribute assignments were simply approached differently. The addition of the three outer planets actually clarified a pattern in the Tarot cards that had be overlooked before, which is that there are two distinctly different groups in the Major Arcana: there are ten character-based cards 0-9 and twelve experiential based cards 10-21.
The ten Ideal Numbers 0-9 correspond to the first ten cards of the Tarot and these cards can also represent the ten planetary archetypes: 0- The Fool -Sun, 1- The Magician -Mercury, 2- The High Priestess -Venus, 3- The Empress -Earth, 4- The Emperor -Mars, 5- The High Priest -Jupiter, 6- The Lover -Saturn, 7- The Charioteer -Uranus, 8- The Courageous -Pluto, and 9- The Hermit -Neptune. Whereas the twelve double numbered Tarot cards can correspond with the natures of the twelve Zodiac signs and their twelve different types of experiences: 10-The Wheel of Fortune -Taurus, 11- Justice -Libra, 12- The Hanged Man -Pisces, 13- Death -Scorpio, 14- Temperance -Sagittarius, 15- The Devil -Capricorn, 16- The Lightning Struck Tower -Aries, 17- The Star -Aquarius, 18- The Moon -Cancer, 19- The Sun -Leo-, 20- Judgement -Gemini, and 21- The World -Virgo.
The Moon is excluded from this systems Major Arcana attributes, not to diminish its’ importance but to exalt it, because the moon has its’ own completely separate array of attributes; the Minor Arcana. The Minor Arcana is all about the cycles of the Moon, which are distinctly different than the cycles of the rest of the Solar system, since the Moon is not a planet but a satellite of Earth. The Minor Arcana is all about the sublunar cycles and the mundane affairs that we experience in life, which is why the Moon warrants a whole separate Arcana to account for its’ powerful influences on our life.