Cult of Tarot Forum

I am beginning to attribute the Hebrew letters to the Major Arcana and wanted to use this in Gematria but I have an initial problem in doing so that I need your help with. How should I translate English words into Hebrew? Do I try to map the phonetic sounds of English syllables into the letters that they seem to sound like? Or is there a direct relationship between English letters and Hebrew letters? Please help me broaden my Tarot studies to include letters and words!

I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you going to translate the English titles of the cards into Hebrew? The original titles were in French (well, in some schools) and were by no means standardized in spelling. You would certainly run into problems there, as gematria is based on the number-letter values. Perhaps you'd be better off translating the actual English word (title) into Hebrew first then using the gematria for your numerology:
https://www.biblewheel.com/GR/GR_Database.php

Gematria and tarot don't really fit very well. The tarot attributes letters to the cards from א to ת but not in the way letters would be used to count in Hebrew. They go parallel until the 10 י but then, the tarot simply continues the sequence of letters land disregards their numerical value.



If you need to translate the card titles into Hebrew, I can help you, or you can simply look at a Hebrew tarot website like this one https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A7%D7 ... 7%95%D7%98 There you have the full list.

השוטה ha-shoteh the Fool
הקוסם ha-kosem the Magician
הכוהנת ha-kohenet the HIgh Priestes
etc

There are some similarities between the Latin and the Hebrew alphabet (there is no such thing as an English alphabet, we are using the Latin alphabet) and Latin letters have been used to depict numbers (I, II, III, IV...) but in the Western tradition, we mostly use Arabic numbers. So there is no natural relationship between letters and numbers like we have in Hebrew.

But why not use English letters and numbers? Gematrix has two online calculators, one in English: https://www.gematrix.org/ and one in Hebrew: https://www.gimatria.co.il/?word=

I don't precisely understand what you're out to do but as I said, if you need help translating anything into Hebrew, I'm here to help. And I also know enough about Gematria for some basic steps.

Is there a direct correspondence between the Hebrew and English alphabet that i can use or is there a method of reducing spoken syllables to Hebrew letters is basically what I am asking. This is the stage I'm at. Fully aware of virtually every other attribution of the Thoth deck bar an expertise on the occult formulas behind each card. Tarot has been my introduction to the occult. The nearest piece of the jigsaw puzzle to me right now is reducing every word I come across into the Tarot deck.

No, there is no direct correspondence between the Hebrew and Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet doesn't have letters like א or ע, which are consonants without a sound. There are no vowel letters, only punctuation. So the Hebrew alphabet is really different from the Latin one, although some letters and their arrangement resemble.

Do you want to transliterature English words to Hebrew? Is that what you mean with "spoken syllables"? I offered my help already, my Hebrew is better than my English by now. Just let me know the syllables in question and I'll transliterate them into Hebrew script.

ETA: If you ask me, Gematria works only in Hebrew so I see no sense in translating to English and then back to Hebrew. Gematria is based on the Hebrew Bible and the meaning of each letter, unchanged for thousands of years. The Hebrew letters are unique and are only used for Hebrew (and Yiddish). English is a modern language, uses the Latin alphabet like many other languages, and it's a very modern language. In its contemporary form, it involved after the Norman conquest. Compared to Hebrew, that's a very young language. The Latin alphabet has other traditions, for examples the symbolic shapes of its letters in medieval manuscripts etc. But the whole practice of Gematria revolves around the numerical value that Latin letters simply don't have.

da3dal wrote: ↑01 Dec 2020, 09:31 I am beginning to attribute the Hebrew letters to the Major Arcana and wanted to use this in Gematria but I have an initial problem in doing so that I need your help with. How should I translate English words into Hebrew? Do I try to map the phonetic sounds of English syllables into the letters that they seem to sound like? Or is there a direct relationship between English letters and Hebrew letters? Please help me broaden my Tarot studies to include letters and words!

Find a good copy of Strong's Exhaustive Concordance online. There are a number of sites for it. Use that to look up English words and get their Greek and Biblical Hebrew equivalents.

Get a copy of Kaplan's "The Sepher Yetzirah" and Wang's " The Qabalistic Tarot" as a foundation to understand the esoteric Hebrew alphabet from both an original Judaic Kabbalistic (no tarot) vs. Hermetic Qabalistic (all about the tarot) perspective because Gematria is -very- Kabbalistic at its core. And imo, reading the Qabalistic Tarot will help leaps and bounds in understanding why the RWS and Thoth decks attribute the Hebrew letters to the Major Arcana cards in the way they do. Having a solid foundation in that is pretty essential in creating your own (I'm a fan of creating your own).

Here is one of my favorite articles on Gematria itself I recommend to people interested in it.

I'm not very impressed with Strong's Concordance. Maybe I looked up the wrong website but if you don't know Hebrew already it's pretty confusing (and the pronounciation hints are simply horrible). Or can you tell me from this page what a simple word like tree is in Hebrew?

The Morfix dictionary is much easier to use but it doesn't have a transliteration. Dict.com is probably better because you get a reasonable pronounciation guide. I think if you check the example word tree again, you'll get the right results, etz or ilan.

Nemia wrote: ↑05 Dec 2020, 17:40 I'm not very impressed with Strong's Concordance. Maybe I looked up the wrong website but if you don't know Hebrew already it's pretty confusing (and the pronounciation hints are simply horrible). Or can you tell me from this page what a simple word like tree is in Hebrew?

The Morfix dictionary is much easier to use but it doesn't have a transliteration. Dict.com is probably better because you get a reasonable pronounciation guide. I think if you check the example word tree again, you'll get the right results, etz or ilan.

You are right re: Stong's Concordance. That isn't going to be helpful for what Da3dal needs.