“Highest in Red, Lowest in Black” (or Not)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Occasionally, playing cards and tarot cards converge in unlikely ways, as they do here.
When my brother and I were kids learning to play “trick-taking” cards games from our grandmother (who was an old-school cartomancer, although she would never read for us or even talk about it), her oft-repeated mantra was “Highest in red, lowest in black.” A few of the games she taught us employed the “trump-suit” convention* that, in the “red” suits of Hearts (tarot Cups) and Diamonds (tarot Coins or Pentacles), the higher-numbered “pip” cards (culminating with the Tens) always beat the lower ones (Ace was the least powerful pip in “red”).
Conversely, in the “black” suits of Clubs (tarot Batons or Wands) and Spades (tarot Swords) the lower-numbered pips were superior to the higher ones, with a “black” Ace always winning the trick against its numerical successors. In his book, The Esoteric Tarot: Ancient Sources Rediscovered in Hermeticism and Cabalah, Ronald Decker covers this practice as it occurred in the Muslim Mameluke and Indian Mogul decks, but his assumptions differ from those of both my early exposure and the approach of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
Decker notes that in the “long” — or black — suits (Batons and Swords), the Ten beat the Ace, while in the “round” — or red — suits (Cups and Coins), the Ace conquered the Ten, with the cards between them in either case following a consistent rising-or-falling formula. He then talks about how Pythagorean teaching migrated into the theories of the Hermetists by stating that the number One (aka the Ace) “possessed the first position and the strongest qualities (pure potential, free of conflict, utterly integrated).” The One stands apart from numeration in that the act of enumerating inherently embraces a multiplicity that One does not exhibit; thus the Ace is preeminent in the sequence because its character is not compromised by ramification. So far, this agrees with what I’ve understood of the Golden Dawn’s “Tree-of-Life” numerical progression.
But Decker proceeds to muddy the waters by reiterating that in the benevolent “round” suits the Ace is highest while the Ten is “the most remote, the most dilute,” and in the malevolent “long” suits “the diluted power of the Ten is preferable to the concentrated Ace.” I’ve never seen this to carry over into the esoteric precepts based on the Hermetic Qabalah, in which the pristine Ace of any suit is always elevated about the rest of the series, with the lowly Ten as the most diminished and exhausted of the pips in that suit. I think of this as the “energy depletion” model of devolution attending the “Descent of Spirit into Matter” on the Tree of Life. (C.S. Lewis touched on it in The Discarded Image, in which he explored “medieval cosmology and the Ptolemaic universe.”)
Personally, I can’t see being that anal about suit differentiation in this regard since number is a more fundamental principle than suit and element, which mainly add symbolic nuance or “coloration” of a mundane, psychological or spiritual kind. (For example, both the Ace of Wands and the Ace of Pentacles convey the idea of quiescent potential, but one promises creative inspiration while the other promotes pragmatism.) From a practical perspective it’s much cleaner to simply treat all of the Aces as purer and more potent than any of the degraded Tens, regardless of whether Pythagoras believed Ten to be the “perfect number.” Some schools of thought revered the Nine as the number of perfection (Greek philosophers named it the “Third Completion”), while the Ten is more like a “postscript” that is weakened by its distance from the source and its earthly encumbrance. I’ve always found Aleister Crowley’s use of this paradigm in The Book of Thoth to be the most compelling demonstration of its effectiveness, and it is the one I favor over all others.
*For those unfamiliar with the “trump-suit” concept, it is the suit presented as the dominant series by the player who opens the hand, and “pip” cards of that suit beat all others of the non-trump variety.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on April 7, 2024.
