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]

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 indetermination realizations of the previous letter, Ayn, toward the evolutionary adaptive perfection 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 has 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. The sensual influx from the North in the Cube of Space is precisely described by this equation, which contains the energy-archetypes for existence, fertilization, movement and Life. The Empress-Tower Contradiction 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. Even a brief glance at the phonosemantic associations of the letters Dallet ("d") and Phay ("p/f") demonstates the dyslexia of Empress/Dallet and Tower/Pay. Which card looks like those letters to you? Resistance/response to Ghimmel of Bayts containing Aleph: physical existence: root of all things   Sepher Yetsira 4 Dallet / Thallet Hebrew: Door Golden Dawn   Formative physical existence as resistance/response to life Symbolic authority, origin of physical existence, division Phono- semantic Door, divides into two parts, energy gate thin thread thrust through thick; think, thing do, don't, down, drown, delay, disaster, duh Qualities Wisdom 'Aqarav Folly Toleh   Primordial substance; unstructured, undifferentiated energy; superposition of alternatives   Sepher Yetsira 80 Pay / Phay Hebrew: Mouth Golden Dawn   Formative actualization of mother Nature's evolutionary potentials Symbolic immortality, expression Phono- semantic precise place or point, spreads into a plane; part vs whole fountain, fizz, fray; form, flux; flower, fecund pin prick, peak, power; imposter, proof Qualities Wealth Shaur Poverty Mozenaim