Reading & Pronouncing the Sephiroth

[Joan Marie]

I have just finished, with the help of Nemia, a new learning activity designed to help us learn the Sephiroth.

This is the 3rd one, and in this one you will learn to recognise (read) the written Hebrew word and also hear its pronunciation.

Nemia kindly supplied a recording of her own voice for the audio portion.

here is a screen shot from the activity:

Click the Audio icon to hear the pronunciation of the Hebrew word you see, click "Turn" to see the Sephira name in "non-Hebrew" letters.

You can try it out for yourself here:
Tree of Life: Hebrew Symbols and Pronunciation

[Nemia]

I want to add here some aspects of the Hebrew words of the sephiroth. When I read this thread, I thought that might be interesting to some, but I didn't want to derail the thread so I came here instead.

Each Hebrew word is based on a root (usually consisting of four consonants) which are then changed in different ways using vowels and adding pre-fixes or suffixes or doubling of the consonants. These changes are consistent for the different roots, like in English, you always add the suffix -s if you want to put a verb into the present tense third person singular.

But if you know the meaning of the root and the different words that were made using the root, you get a better sense of their meaning.

Let's talk about Netzach and Gvurah.

Netzach is especially interesting. It's one of the few Hebrew words where the root has different meanings.

The root of the word is N Tz Ch - the last ch is like in German Bach. נצח Netzach means eternity, and if you want to say even more you say: netzach netzachim, eternity of eternities.

But the same root turned into a verb, menatzeach (the first e is hardly pronounced), means: the winning one, or in appropriate English: he wins. And it also means the conductor of an orchestra. I'm not sure but I believe that this is a modern use of the word. In Biblical Hebrew, there are the two core meanings: eternity and victory.

Nitzachon means victory, hantzacha means commemoration. A memorial site for example is called atar hantzacha.

So the sephirah Netzach has both aspects: it reminds us of eternity and of the possibility of victory. I say possibility because the sephirah is called Netzach and not Nitzachon. What we need to turn Netzach into Nitzachon is, and that's my speculation, Gvura.

Gvura is Netzach's pendant on the other side of Tif'eret.

Netzach is associated with Venus, Gvurah with Mars, the Sun, Tif'eret, is between them. Ironically, Gvurah and Tif'eret are feminine nouns while Netzach is masculine, but I don't think the grammatical gender tells us much. It simply means that Gvurah and Tif'eret are derivate words that had feminine prefixes or suffixes added to change the root's meaning.

Gvura is based on the root G V R גבר, spoken gever. Gever means man, gibbor means hero, gvurah is heroism. Hagbarah means strengthening, putting up the volume.

It's interesting to compare the other Hebrew words for man: adam and ish.

Adam is the earth-born man; earth is adamah in Hebrew, and adom means red.

Ben adam, the son of man, is in Hebrew every man. In Christian usage, Son of Man has become a word for Jesus.C.S. Lewis calls humans sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. If adam means earth-born human, Chavah/Eva/Eve means living being (a derivation of chaim, life).

Kabbalah lovers may know the concept of adam kadmon. In today's Hebrew, adam kadmon is also the word for prehistoric humans.

Ish and ishah, man and woman, are less exalted in everyday use, but the root these words are based on may be associated with fire, esh. It's not completely clear where these words come from.

Back to gever. While adam and ish have feminine equivalents, gever has no such feminine form. When you put gever into its feminine form, gvurah, it turns into an abstract concept: heroism. As I said above, gibbor is a hero and gibborah a heroine, but gever is a purely masculine word and heroism in Hebrew a masculine concept, i.e. based on traits that are thought masculine. And that suits the association with Mars very well.

An ironic Hebrew expression for a hyper-masculine man is gever-gever, a man's man, a macho.

If you ever read anywhere the word Geborah, please know that this is grammatically wrong. Whoever transcribed gvura as geborah had no idea of how Hebrew works. There are strict rules for the usage of the letter vet/bet, I don't want to get into them right now but if you want to know more, you can read it here. In Hebrew Deborah is called Dvora (the bee), and there is no such thing as Geborah, it's gvurah.

Between Gvurah and Netzach, as I said above, we have Tif'eret.

Now tif'eret is a lovely word. The root is P aleph R פאר. Aleph א is the first letter and it's a consonant without a sound. You can add any vowel you want to aleph, and it will sound differently, but it's always aleph.

An example. You meet an Israeli family. They have four children: Uri, Erez, Amir and Ilan. And they will tell you: we decided that all our children's names will start with the same letter. So you say: what do you mean? U, E, A and I are four different letters! And they'll say: yes, but in Hebrew, they're all written aleph: אורי אורז אמיר אילן. And that's true. It just depends on which vowel you add to the consonant aleph.

There are two such unspoken consonants in Hebrew and for newcomers, they're extremely confusing. How can a consonant be soundless? But it fits to a language where the divine name is unspeakable as well.

So how do we pronounce the root? Pe'er, with a little break at the ' sign. I recorded the names of the sephiroth, you have the links in Joan Marie's post above.

Pe'er means glory. Mefu'ar means glorious, luxurious, impressive.

Tif'eret means glorification, glorious beauty. On Israeli Independence Day, 12 citizens are invited to light the torches of Independence (twelve because of the twelves tribes of Israel), and when they do so, they say: le-tif'eret medinat-Yisrael, for the glorification of the State of Israel. You can also use it as a sarcasm of course (everyday Hebrew is big on sarcasm).

It's also a rare-but-not-unknown girls' name. Sounds a bit like Tiffany.

I will look at the differences between the words for glory and splendour (tif'eret and hod) later.

[Joan Marie]

This is brilliant Nemia.
Thank you so much!

[Nemia]

In this thread here on the boards, Ciderwell mentioned an article about the Hebrew connections of the Fool card. I read it and want to give my opinion now.

Of course everybody can write about the tarot and the Hebrew alphabet whatever they wish. I think that Jenniaelaine packed everything and its grandfather into her article, and it's mainly not about Hebrew connections of the Fool but every association one could have concerning the Fool, from quantum physics to chakra via astrology and back again.

Any article about the Hebrew alphabet and its meaning that ends with Jesus is obviously not written by a Jewish writer and personally, I have a little aversion against people stuffing Jesus into Jewish culture but that's a personal thing. I'm simply hyper-aware of the fact that Christians have stuffed Jesus into Jewish people's throats for centuries and while I'm all for cultural exchange, I find this throwing together of Old and New Testament a bit forced. The New Testament cribbed a lot from the Old and well, let's stop here, I don't want to rant!

Much of what Jenniaelaine says about the letter aleph is taken from Carlos Suares and is free writing, meaning associations the author had about the letter aleph. He proves nothing of it.

Aleph is the supreme energy, subtle, alive, but not existing as itself in the space-time world we know, because it is relative. It is the primal energy, it is in all and all is in aleph.

All this says pretty much nothing. It's a flight of fancy. Now it's possible to take flights of fancy with the Hebrew letters into any direction you want. If you follow the pious Jewish Chabad movement, this is what you know about aleph.

The gematria of alef is one, representing the one (or oneness of) G‑d, as we say in the famous prayer: “Hear, O Israel, G‑d is our L-rd, G‑d is One.”

On a more complex level, we explained that the form of the alef comprises three letters: two yuds and a vav. The gematria of the yud is ten—two yuds being twenty. A vav is six; the sum of all three totaling twenty-six. One of the great names of G‑d is the Four Letter Name י-ה-ו-ה, the Tetragrammaton, or Ineffable Name. The gematria of the Yud (=10), the Hei (=5), the Vav (=6) and the Hei (=5) totals 26, the same as the yud-vav-yud of the alef. Through the connection of their respective gematrios, the alef represents G‑d’s Ineffable Name.

Now that's based on Hebrew letters, their numerical value, and the operations you can make to form new words from letters with a certain numerical value - gematria. And the whole article concerns itself exclusively with the Hebrew Bible and its significance.

But Jenniaelaine writes about the tarot, and of course the pious Chabadniks wouldn't touch tarot because hey, fortunetelling, not allowed! So back to Jenniaelaine.

Now she sees Hebrew letters everywhere, and I don't buy it. Colman Smith included some Hebrew letters in her cards, usually the tetragrammaton and some letters yod raining down. But I don't believe there's a tetragrammaton on the Fool's undertunic, although it might look like that to someone that it is. Have a look at the tetragrammaton on Temperance - that's an obvious word written in Hebrew. The Fool's tunic doesn't look like writing to me and what Jenniaelaine writes about it is again pure speculation.

To jump from aleph to alpha and omega to the Ourobouros and the Milky Way is all very nice but in the tarot, the Fool has the value 0 but aleph doesn't. Aleph is ONE and there is no exception to that. This is one of the signs that the people who constructed the connections between Hebrew letters and numbers had no real grasp of the concept of Hebrew letters. Otherwise they would, like they do in some traditions, identify Aleph and the Fool as One. Aleph is not zero. Yom aleph is the first day (Sunday). Kita aleph is the first grade. Aleph is one. Now if Jenialaine had tackled that inconsistency! It's difficult to explain away and it's simply a mistake, but one that doesn't trouble people who don't know Hebrew but simply use Hebrew. I count Aleister Crowley amongst their number.

I don't see the shin in the Fool's finger and I don't see the tav in the mountain. I think that's stretching visual association too far. It's a bit like poor Sigmund Freud interpreting a painting by Leonardo da Vinci by looking at it sideways, believing there's an image of a bird and now taking off with free associations. But there is of course no bird. Had Leonardo wished to put a bird there, believe me it would have been a better bird than the poor awkward thing Freud saw.

You can't simply project your own assocations onto a painting or card and then interpret them as if they were there.

Now even if the Fool's fingers were giving a sign of shin - why didn't write the author that this might be a hint to the white rose in his hand? After all, a rose is called shoshana, and there you have the shin twice. It's also associated with the city of Shushan, mentioned in the Book of Esther. Take that wherever you want, it has as little connection to the Fool as the spiritual shin Jennielaine found there.

Concering the Heh she interprets as outbreath of G-d. Now that's an interesting esoteric association, but more often, the connection between breath and spirit is attached to the letter chet ח which looks a lot like heh ה if you don't know Hebrew. But it sounds totally different and it also behaves differently. Jennielaine talks about breath and spirit, both called ruach in Hebrew רוח with a chet at the end, but doesn't differentiate between he and chet.

Now there is something more interesting about the letter Heh, if she insists that she sees it on the card. The numerical value of Heh is five (chamesh), and five is the number of fingers humans have, and it's a lucky number. I myself have a lot of chamsa hands next to my door for luck, and when someone says something unlucky, the usual response will be that your superstitious Jewish counterpart will lift her hand, stretch out her fingers and say: chamsa chamsa chamsa!, i.e., I repel bad luck! This is of course Jewish folk superstition but it's much more powerfully associated with the number Five and the Heh than the outbreath of G-d.

Jennielaine sees seven pearls on the Fool's belt and associates the Seven with the Pleiads which is fine I guess but then jumps over to the chakras and never stops anywhere to go deeper. Why not take a moment to think about the seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, bearing the numerical value of seven, and try to find a connection there? It's zayin, which has a lot of interesting associations, too. and the number Seven doesn't only relate to the Pleiads but also to the seven planets, virtues and days of the week. So why the Pleiads?

Another example.

Shin stands for the Shekinah, the Holy Spirit. The name Moses has a central Shin, M Sh H, as does the Hebrew name for Jesus being Yeheshuah, Yh Sh Vh. Its meaning is the presence of God on earth or a symbol or manifestation of his presence. It is the settling or dwelling of God’s presence (in these men).

If you want to connect Moshe/Moses and Yeshu/Jesus via the letter shin ש, why not mention the word mashiach/messias? משה - משיח - ישוע all have a shin in the middle. It would still be a fragile connection but even her "transliteration" of Jesus' name is incomplete. The ayin is missing. She writes Yeheshuah but where's the ah in her transcription? You can call Jesus in Hebrew either Yeshua or Yeshu but the transcription is different. Yod shin ayin or yod shin vav. Decide.

But the most glaring lacuna is the simple fact that the Fool is called Kesil in Hebrew, and Kesil is also the name of the constellation of Orion. Jennielaine mentions that there is a connection but she doesn't mention the name Kesil. But there is a lot of Jesus talk. Now talking at length of the cross and the nails using Jewish symbolism when for generations, Jews have been framed as murderers of Jesus - in my book, that's bad taste. Of course Jesus was Jewish himself and all he said was based on a Jewish understanding of the Hebrew Bible.

So in my opinion this article is a mishmash of esoteric associations that are possible but have no real link to anything Hebrew. To call it "The Fool card and its Hebrew connections" is a bit far-fetched. She should have called it "The Fool card and some possible esoteric speculation from different traditions". But if you don't know Hebrew, don't write about it. For someone who does, it makes the text meaningless.

Sorry for the rant.

[TheLoracular]

So in my opinion this article is a mishmash of esoteric associations that are possible but have no real link to anything Hebrew. To call it "The Fool card and its Hebrew connections" is a bit far-fetched. She should have called it "The Fool card and some possible esoteric speculation from different traditions". But if you don't know Hebrew, don't write about it. For someone who does, it makes the text meaningless.

Sorry for the rant.

So... I also read Jenniaelaine's article. It is the first article on that site that I'd ever read. It was a very painful read because the author mishmashed so much together.

I found myself just nodding my head a lot in agreement as I read your post above, lol.

I am -NOT- a fan of Cipher of Genesis which is the only Carlo Suares book I've ever read.

As eclectic of a reader as I am? There's a couple subgenre of books that fall into the vast metaphysical category that I shy away from. Suares' work fits one of those categories.

[Nemia]

I'm glad you agree, I wrote my rant in the middle of the night and was afraid I was too sharp. I didn't mean to make mincemeat of the author or readers who find her writing inspiring - I don't know any other of her articles.

[Rose Lalonde]

I agree with your thoughts about the article, Nemia. Totally understand why you addressed it.

Can't help tossing in one thing, but will be brief so I don't derail. I think Crowley embraces that Aleph is 1 even though he has 0 for the Fool, since for that card he says "'Zero as plus 1 plus minus 1'" Not just semantics, since the minus is shown in the art where his Fool is wrapped within the negative veils. -- Not that anyone needs to agree with that equation or its meaning, of course. I do in this instance though.

[Nemia]

It works for the aleph, I agree. But it makes bet one. But in Hebrew, for thousands of years and today, the meaning of bet is TWO. Gimel is three and not two, Dalet is four and not three. It's not an association or tradition - it's the name of the number. Yom gimel is the third day is Tuesday.

Imagine that someone who doesn't speak your language decides that the names of numbers will be interchanged, and you read on a card: 0 One. 1 Two. 2 Three.

It doesn't make any sense to anyone who knows Hebrew. Good old Uncle Aleister loved to wrap himself in esoteric knowledge and write in a style that made the neophyte's head spin. It all sounds so meaningful. But if you base a theory on the inner workings of a language, in my book, you should respect that language. If you want to find meaning in kabbalah and other esoteric teachings of Judaism, you can't change the most basic meanings - the meanings of letters, not even words!

You can't use gematria if you don't respect the numerical values of the letters you count.

For me, much as I have learned from Crowley, this is a very serious drawback. It's also a problem for Yoav Ben Dov who was of course Hebrew native speaker. I'll have to go back and read what he wrote about it.

[Nemia]

Yoav, this gentle soul, explains it all very nicely in his chapter "Hebrew Letters" in his book "Tarot - the Open Reading", a wonderful book.

The French tradition of assigning Hebrew letters to cards was created by Eliphas Levy, and he assigns aleph to the Magician, and then the rest of the letters follow as they should.

True, this always is at odds with gematria because in gematria, after the number 10 (yod) the letters get higher values, otherwise you can't express all numbers. So kaf is 20, lamed is 30 etc.

Let's say you want higher number. You simply combine the different letters. 33 is lamed-gimel, shortened lag. That's why the holiday of the 33. day in the counting of the Omer is called Lag ba-Omer.

Today is for example, in the Hebrew calendar, the 19 of Iyyar of the year 5781. The long number for the year is written in Hebrew as תשפ'א tav, shin, peh, aleph, and we shorten the name of this year to Tashpah. We count academic years in Hebrew letters, not only religious holidays.

Back to the French tradition. It simply continues to count on after yod, so lamed is not 30 but 12.

But at least you don't get the Hebrew numbers written next to Arabic numbers that don't fit. There are also very interesting links between the cards and the Hebrew letters when you assign them like that. The Hanged Man gets lamed, ל and he looks a bit like a lamed himself, etc.

But the English tradition won out. The Golden Dawn wrote in English, and the tarot community that I know is overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon. I'm sure there is a lively French tarotsphere but my French is not good enough to access it. (There is a German tarotsphere too where I used to be active for a while but nowadays, I prefer the English/speaking one).

So the Golden Dawn decided that gematria and Kabbalah are nice to have, but changed them according to their own needs.

Yoav:

This correspondence may seem strange to those who know gematria, the traditional notation of numbers by Hebrew letters which is very important in the Cabala.

Yoav writes about reading with the TdM so if you're confused with this matter, he recommends ignoriing it.

If there are Hebrew letters on your cards, he recommends (as would I( to use the correspondences used by the deck creator. TdM and French school: Eliphas Levi, GD decks: GD correspondences.

It's most important to keep in mind this difference.


Yoav says if you're not sure to which school your deck belongs, check the order of the majors, and there you see it.

French school: 8 is Justice, 11 is Strength/Fortitude/Force

English school: 8 is Strength/Fortitude/Force, 11 is Justice

This was necessary because the GD school aligned the majors with the astrological signs, and if you associate Strength with Leo, it has to come before Justice and Libra. And it's quite obvious why Leo and Strength fit, and Libra and Justice. The symbols are the same: the lion, the scales.

Many people are not aware that the GD tradition is younger than the French one, so they talk about decks that "change the traditional sequence of cards" because they think the RWS order was the original and traditional order. No, it was not, Waite changed it (Crowley of course didn't).


I guess I'll write about gematria once I have a bit of time...

Just of very well-known example.

חי chet-yod means alive, chai

chet is 8 and yod is 10, that makes 18 together. And that makes the number 18 a lucky number.

Many people wear a pendant with the word חי around their necks. And names that are built from letters that add up to 18 are lucky numbers. Avia for example, it aleph, bet, yod, he אביה

Aleph is 1, bet is 2, yod is 10, he is 5. Together 18.


This is really basic but that's the principle.


Oh dear oh dear, can you believe a numerophobic wrote the above????????

[TheLoracular]

[quote=Nemia post_id=24062 time=1619871738 user_id=54]
Yoav, this gentle soul, explains it all very nicely in his chapter "Hebrew Letters" in his book "Tarot - the Open Reading", a wonderful book.

The French tradition of assigning Hebrew letters to cards was created by Eliphas Levy, and he assigns aleph to the Magician, and then the rest of the letters follow as they should.

You did such a beautiful job of explaining it!

And you just reminded me to bump up Tarot- the Opening Reading on my list to read this summer I've always postponed because I just wasn't into the Marseilles deck into the past and very stuck in a GD-flavored paradigm but now I'm mending my ways. One of the other nuances about Levi, which hit hard as I started to do a chapter by chapter commentary of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation ((so much better of a translation than those done by the Golden Dawn themselves)) on Tarot Esoterica is that Levi didn't simply assign the Hebrew letters to each Major Arcana; he tried to tie each card into what each number means on a deeply conceptual level. He was inspired by traditional Jewish Kabbalah and Christian Cabala but a lot of other things too. He created something new based on a lot of sources.

So The Magician wasn't simply Aleph as #1, but #1 as the Monad, divine unity. The High Priestess represented the binary principle or the law of polarity in picture form, The Empress represents the Pria Materia and what the Mother Letters convey in Kabbalah, etc.,. etc. He gets especially into this with VII The Chariot, which was probably his favorite of the Major Arcana back during his early career when he was writing Doctrine (Dogma) and Rituals. 7 was especially sacred to Levi because it combined 3 + 4 and he tried to argue that everything associated with the number of seven could be linked to the classical planets. Now, it so happened that the Sepher Yetzirah supported this and the 7 double letters were linked by association to the seven planets in that text and in Jewish astrology. Stuff like that made it easy for Levi to find justification to linking tarot cards with occult principles and Hebrew letters. The Hebrew letters did indeed have a very long tradition of being associated with certain mystical concepts likewise found in astrology and alchemy, both within and without Jewish mysticism.

Levi tried really, really hard to make convincing arguments that the Major Arcana from the get-go were a set of literal hieroglyphs of the Secret Mysteries that started in ancient cultures and he merely was revealing certain secrets that were biblically and pre-biblically old. My personal truth is that Levi poured the Hermetic (and other flavors of) mysticism into the tarot that wasn't there before him and his colleague occultists. It was a card game and could be used for cartomancy, sure. He made it something so much more.

Imo, there is only as much connection between the mystical concepts for each letter based on Kabbalah (specifically the Sepher Yetzirah) and individual Major Arcana as the author/artist designs into the cards. So a Golden-Dawn-based deck will have "true" associations using their system only because the author/artist put them there. Wirth and those who followed Levi more closely will have different "true" associations.

[Rose Lalonde]

Sorry, I didn't see that you had replied. Yes, agreed, the Hebrew letters have different numbers than the ones on the tarot cards the GD associated with them. When you mentioned the Fool, I noted that Crowley addresses that issue for the card because you talked about him not knowing Hebrew, and it's my impression that he did know, and intentionally went along with the GD's changes. Since he made his own change associating 17 with Heh, I think we can safely say he was willing. But I didn't mean for it to seem like I was advocating for all the choices made by the GD and Crowley, though it's true that the Thoth and especially TM are my favorite decks to read with.

[Nemia]

He may have known the basics but he didn't really know Hebrew. Hebrew letters don't HAVE numbers, they ARE numbers. It's not an association you can change, like you can say: in my deck, Swords are associated with Fire. Aleph IS one. Crowley can decide to change that, of course, but then he disrespects or misunderstands the DNA of the language, and then actually he can't take over other aspects of mysticism based on the Hebrew language.

I'm wish it wasn't so but for me this is the crack in the lute's body that very nearly spoils it for me. It shows what a huge ego Crowley had though My own hunch is that he relied on Israel Regardie or some other friend who knew Hebrew, it would be interesting to find out how much he himself really knew.

It's true that after 10, the numbers and letters wouldn't work anyway, but for the numbers under 10, I wish he'd gone along with the French system.

Other decks change the decan assocations, I think the Tarot of the Holy Light and the Celestial Tarot make some pretty big changes. I can live with them because they're well-reasoned.

There are simply some things in the GD system that you can explain but they still creak a bit. The assocation of Aces and Princesses/Pages with the quadrants of the sky is logical but it also looks a bit as though they didn't know where to put them because they didn't have decans for them. Okay, Aces are Kether and Princesses Malkuth, and Kether and Malkuth meet, and the quadrants of the sky are Kether and the geographical regions are Malkuth, and it works with the fixed signs nicely - but hm, it's a very different mindset from the rhythm of the decans.

The meeting of Mars and Mars between the last and the first decan is another little creak. And it's much older than the GD.

And then the elemental trumps. Either you have only three (Fool, Hanged Man, Aeon) or you give the World a double assignation (planetary: Saturn, and Earth), neither is completely satisfactory. I see in my tarot calendar practice that Fool, Hanged Man and Aeon never show up because they're the only three cards without an astrologicai assignation which would bind them to a specific time span.

It's all models and metaphors, so it's probably good that they're not perfect.

[TheLoracular]

He may have known the basics but he didn't really know Hebrew. Hebrew letters don't HAVE numbers, they ARE numbers. It's not an association you can change, like you can say: in my deck, Swords are associated with Fire. Aleph IS one. Crowley can decide to change that, of course, but then he disrespects or misunderstands the DNA of the language, and then actually he can't take over other aspects of mysticism based on the Hebrew language.

I'm wish it wasn't so but for me this is the crack in the lute's body that very nearly spoils it for me. It shows what a huge ego Crowley had though My own hunch is that he relied on Israel Regardie or some other friend who knew Hebrew, it would be interesting to find out how much he himself really knew.

It's true that after 10, the numbers and letters wouldn't work anyway, but for the numbers under 10, I wish he'd gone along with the French system.

I am going to spend the entire day walking around the house, randomly saying in a loud, proud voice "Tzaddi may not be the Star but ALEPH is ONE, asshat!" and cracking up when my partner just stares at me in a mildly worried way.