Papus and the Trump-Card Septenaries
AUTHOR’S NOTE: With the numbers One through Ten, Papus (Gerard Encausse) found major inspiration in the quaternary paradigm, by which he managed to turn ten “pips” into a triad of four-card arrays. (See my previous essay.) With the trump cards he adopted a septenary model instead, and strove to bring the two onto the same page with some numerical legerdemain. However, the principle was the same in both cases: the last card of a set is also the first card of the subsequent set and serves as a transition between them.
This imaginative excursion has similarities to the “Four Worlds” on the Tree of Life, in which the bottom sephira (Malkuth) of one world is also the topmost emanation (Kether) of the next lower world. I don’t find his arcane “kabbalistic” convolutions particularly convincing in light of later esoteric handling of the trumps, and A.E. Waite seemed to share that sentiment in his preface to Tarot of the Bohemians. These musings run parallel to the later experiments of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn but they aren’t of the same lineage in that they are more mathematical and mystical than symbolic (in short, at least at this point in the book, Papus is mainly “playing with the numbers”). Those of us who are familiar with the customary 7×3 layout of the Major Arcana will most likely find them curious, but they definitely provide some food for thought. (These images offer a photographic rendering of the diagrams from the book; all are from Le Tarot de Marseille, copyright of Naipes Heraclio Fournier, Vitoria, Spain.)
In the first septenary, the Chariot does indeed suggest “movin’ on.” In Papus’ system, this series is “active,” representing the Yod of Tetrgrammaton; it has affinity for the number One. The key cards are I, IIII and VII, all of which he relates to “One” in his quaternary sequence.
In the second septenary, the “namless Arcanum,” XIII, with its emphasis on severing ties, also has connotations of advancing to another level. This set is “passive,” depicting the initial Heh of Tetragrammaton, and has a connection to the number Two. The key cards are VII, X and XIII.
The third (and final) septenary ends the series with the Sun; the last set has a ternary architecture (a “ternary of transition” according to Papus) as described in the next paragraph. This septenary relates to the number Three and the Vau of Tetragrammaton; it is “neutral” in the estimation of Papus. The key cards are XIII, XVI and XVIIII. I find it instructive that this group includes four of the five most challenging cards in the deck (minus the Hanged Man, which stands just out of range). This may well be because it occurs at the end of the septenary chain, presaging the transition into the minor arcana and their associated travails. But the Sun seems to bestow a final blessing on its way out.
The last set of four cards — actually “3+1” — concludes with the unnumbered Fool, which Papus equates to zero (although he says it “ought to correctly bear the number 22”). This ternary represents the number Four and the “Heh Final” of Tetragrammaton. It establishes the “connection between the major and minor arcana” per Papus, who terms it “passage from the creative and providential world to the created world of destiny.” He observes that the encapsulated Fool in the center is the key “transitional” card, in that it “closes the tarot by a marvelous figure, which represents its constitution to those who can understand it;” in other words, it synthesizes the whole of the tarot’s substance as expressed in the trumps. It subsumes the essence of the three cards that surround it as well as that of all 21 cards that precede it, reminding me of the “Cosmic Egg” of 19th-Century occultists (re. the Golden Dawn and, later, Aleister Crowley in The Book of Thoth). The triangular group is suggestive of an incubator, so there appears to be a “hatching” in the future.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 23, 2024.
