17
The Empress
80: Phay forms Venus/Nogah
| Keyword: Raw material; Mother Nature's Evolutionary Potentials |
| Formative symbolism: Unstructured energy/consciousness; potentials for realization. Pay forms Venus/Nogah, in the North, sensual impulses. Pool of actual probabilities. |
| Phay, 80, undifferentiated energy, unstructured substance. The sphere of storage of all undifferentiated energy, or unstructured substance. It expresses the most un-evolved state of energy, as opposed to its achieved freedom in Ayn. |
[Tarot Index]
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The archetype of unstructured energy is Hayt, numerical value 8 in Hebrew. Its projection into actualized existence is Pay/Phay, numerical value 80, the natural world where selection operates from the pool of all possible possibilities created by the indeterminate realizations of the previous letter, Ayn, toward the evolutionary adaptive structure of Tsadde, the next. The Empress is the only card in the Tarot that shows a simple natural unstructured scene as a background. Although all of the non-Mother letter cards contain plenty of astrological references, only the Empress (at least in Rider-Waite) is marked with an actual glyph. Venus/Aphrodite/Ishtar/Isis have always symbolized the natural world, Mother Earth, especially in its sensuality and fecundity. In the Sepher Yetsira the 10th Sephirot is "sealed" with Venus, Nogah, Noun-Way-Gimmel-Hay, 50-6-3-5. The sensual influx from the North in the Cube of Space is precisely described by this equation. Notice the two lives, existential (50) and archetypal (5) in a dynamic (3) union (6). The experience of sensual reality is dual: one life for the outside (50) and one life for the inside (5). The Empress-Tower Contradiction See the Golden Dawn Misadventure and Traditional Tarot Mis-sequencing for the errors of conventional Tarot wisdom. A feminine symbol of nature on Dallet/Mars and a symbol of conflict and destruction on Pay/Venus is as problematic as Strength/Scales and Justice/Lion and should have provoked the obvious swap. Instead, in a failure to think even inside the box, the Golden Dawn changed the planets attributed to the Hebrew letters and left the (seven planetary) Tarot in their 19th century order. Even a brief glance at the phonosemantic associations of the letters Dallet ("d/th") and Phay ("p/f") demonstates the dyslexia of Empress/Dallet and Tower/Pay. Which card looks like those letters to you?
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