The Tarot has always been strongly connected to numerology – witness the fact that 13 is traditionally a card of ill omen, and – while the numbers of some Major Arcana have been tinkered with by various esoteric authorities, the Death card stays firmly at 13.
Nowadays we’re ill served by our teachers where numbers are concerned. The Greeks saw them as mystical symbols, their significance far greater than our limited view today. It’s thought the use of numbers could date back to 30,000 BC or indeed far earlier. There is a photo featured in “The Mind in the Cave” by David Lewis-Williams (2002) that shows a piece of ochre with a regular pattern marked on it which could possibly have been for notation, and it dates from 70,000 years ago.
The earliest system of numbers we know about is that of Babylon – after the first unit of 10 (based presumably on the ten fingers) the second unit is 60 – which still survives today as our time-keeping seconds, minutes and hours. The Greeks viewed the whole issue of numbers as a philosophical question, particularly with regard to the vexed question of 0 (how can ‘nothing’ be something?, or vice versa).
When I was about 16, I learned a bit about the Pythagorean system, which centres around the idea of order – musical order, mathematical order, the order of the cosmos; and then, looking at combinations of numbers, came to make sense to me on some deep atavistic level. Unfortunately I lost the sense of that deep meaning soon after (O level ‘education’ intervened), but more recently I have come to feel that just as I work with the images, the meaning of the number on the card can be intuited. Some of that intuitive ‘feel’ comes from received wisdom – the numbers have, of course, had significance since ancient times.
In medieval times numbers were seen as extremely important. Numbers were used as religious symbols, with medieval scholars – Arab, Christian, and Jewish – looking at the correspondence and significance of numbers. Augustine’s book “City of God”, for example, was consciously divided into 22 sections, to relate to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (and – later – with the kabbalah, the esoteric Hebrew tradition).
I wonder if we could see as synchronous or at least significant the fact that the Tarot contains 22 Major Arcana?
My name is Cilla Conway and I like to think of myself as a visionary artist who has been working with and taking inspiration from The Tarot for more years than I care to think about.
In 1981, I completed my own pack, which I called The Intuitive Tarot. It matters a great deal to me – you can see of the pack at http://www.theintuitivetarot.com.
More recently I started a blog called http://www.tarotcardmeaningsonline.com, which is my attempt to give back for everything The Tarot has given me over the years
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