Under the Cards
For students of the Western esoteric tradition.
The front page keeps this to five tarot cards, and for most people that's all they need. If you know the Tree of Life, you'll have noticed which five. Here's the machinery underneath.
Five paths into Hod
The Sun, The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Tower and Judgement are the five Trumps on the paths that connect to Hod, the eighth Sephirah: Splendor, the sphere of Mercury, of intellect, structure, form and measure.
The working idea is that stuckness, the kind where you can think about your situation endlessly and nothing moves, is Hod in a state of disconnection. The intellect is still running, but it has lost contact with one or more of the living forces that flow into it. Each path is one of those connections, and each one dims in its own way.
| Card | Trump | Letter | Path | Hod to | Attribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Sun | XIX | Resh ר, "head" | 30 | Yesod (Foundation) | the Sun |
| The Devil | XV | Ayin ע, "eye" | 26 | Tiphareth (Beauty) | Capricorn |
| The Hanged Man | XII | Mem מ, "water" | 23 | Geburah (Severity) | Water, a mother letter |
| The Tower | XVI | Peh פ, "mouth" | 27 | Netzach (Victory) | Mars |
| Judgement (The Aeon) | XX | Shin ש, "tooth" | 31 | Malkuth (Kingdom) | Fire and Spirit, a mother letter |
The attributions are the Golden Dawn's. Where Crowley's Thoth deck differs, mostly in calling Judgement "The Aeon," I borrow from both.
The five, briefly
Resh, The Sun. The head, running from Hod to Yesod, the Foundation. Orientation: where you stand, and what matters more than what.
Ayin, The Devil. The eye, running from Tiphareth to Hod. Limits, and your relationship to them. My understanding of this path is still developing.
Mem, The Hanged Man. Water, a mother letter, running to Geburah. Surrender, and the other angle it opens.
Peh, The Tower. The mouth, on the horizontal path between Netzach and Hod. What has been built, and the word that clears it.
Shin, Judgement or The Aeon. The tooth: Fire as Spirit, descending into Malkuth. Not a correction inside the frame but a change of frame. It descends; it isn't climbed toward.
The particular readings the interviewer works from, how each path dims and what the conversation listens for, are my own, built up through my own study and still developing. They stay behind the scenes.
Seeing it live
Ask the interviewer "what's going on behind the curtain?" and you'll get a short status in tarot terms: which cards it has been checking, and what in your own words drew it there.
A note on the name
From Beauty to Splendor is Tiphareth to Hod, which is the Devil's path. I didn't choose it for that. I chose it because the lightning bolt runs Tiphareth to Netzach to Hod, through desire, and I wanted a name that didn't. Don't read too much into the Devil because of it.
I'm a dabbler, not a member of any lineage. If you're steeped in this tradition and see something I've got wrong, I'd love to hear it.