Papus and the “Formula of Tetragrammaton”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In The Tarot of the Bohemians, Gerard Encausse (aka “Papus”) spends the first 20% of the book playing with the numerology of the cards and relating them to the four Hebrew letters of the “ineffable Name of God” (euphemized as “Tetragrammaton”).
Papus stacked up the trump cards in “quaternaries” (four-card sets) following the order “Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh” (although he went from left-to-right rather than the more grammatically-correct right-to-left); in these rows, the last card of each set was repeated as the first card of the next one, thus serving as both the “Heh Final” of the former and the introductory “Yod” of the latter. The pattern was established by the first four cards ending with the Emperor and then renewed with the Emperor kicking off the subsequent row as shown in the photo.
This enabled him to equate the “active” number One to the Magician, the Emperor, the Chariot, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Tower and the Sun (all masculine energies except Death, which is neuter). In their correlation to the Yod, they were presented as “active and creative.”
The cards associated with the initial Heh and the number Two were considered “passive and reactive” in relation to their predecessor: the High Priestess, the Hierophant, Justice, Strength, Temperance, the Star and Judgment. Five of these cards are pictorially female, illustrating his idea that the feminine nature is receptive and reciprocal; only the male Hierophant and the androgynous Angel of Judgement fall “outside the box.”
The letter Vau, the number Three and the cards in the third column were thought to be collective, integrative and synthesizing when brought to bear on the two cards preceding them (Papus used the word “neutralizing,” which I think sends the wrong message since it implies negating rather than reconciling). These are Empress, Lovers, Hermit, Hanged Man, Devil, Moon and World. (Personally, I think his theme starts to unravel slightly here.)
The last column was ascribed to the “Heh Final,” which in this paradigm Papus viewed as “transformational” and “transitional” between one quaternary (or “world”) and the next: these are the same cards that appear at the head of the series immediately below (including the Sun, which inaugurates the “ternary of transformation”). The last iteration of “Heh Final” in this “3+1” ternary he gave to the Fool as the twenty-second trump; in that sense it resolves both the entire tableau and the specific transformational emphasis of the ternary (which I assume reasserts itself as the Magician in a new cycle).
This rather elegant formula allowed Papus to generate some internal symmetry in his model, which otherwise would not have satisfied the Tetragrammaton premise at all levels of the structure. For me, the most valuable aspect of his work up to this point is the hand-off between cards as an expression of “creation, preservation, reconciliation and reformulation,” with the last mode resurfacing in a reconstituted way as patriarch of the next wave.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 19, 2024.
